Develop Leaders in At-Risk Communities, Costa Rica

One element that dramatically differentiates Boy With a Ball from almost every other non-profit organization in existence is our core focus on going to young people and their families where they live rather than sitting in a building, waiting for them to come to us. We believe in outreach as a powerful and vital method for walking into a young person’s life.

Boy With a Ball begins our work in a city in slums for two reasons:  First, people are drawn to being a part of something big and adventurous and walking into their city’s most difficult neighborhoods captures their hearts. Slums are also a major global issue that people around the world care about. One billion people worldwide live in slums (Pithouse, 2008) and the figure will likely grow to 2 billion by 2030. (UN-HABITAT, 2007) These slums concentrate a large number of people living in abject poverty within a relatively small geographic area. As a result, they have tremendous capacity to impact a city in a negative way when they are left undeveloped.

A second reason for beginning in slums is that outreach is easier to do with people who are at the end of themselves than with people who have greater resources and options. It is easier to be open to looking up when you are trapped in a hole than when you are standing on a mountain. For our team members, working with people in difficult situations allows them to find the openings and humility that people need to have in order to be open to growing. As our team has learned to work in at-risk communities, they develop the abilities necessary to learn the sensitivities required for being impactful in communities that are better situated economically.

Boy With a Ball exists to reach, befriend and develop people. More correctly, Boy With a Ball exists to reach and develop young leaders. While our organization has a specific focus on helping young people in economically disadvantaged communities, we know that is not what determines if someone is okay or not.

We cannot let superficial things like how much money someone has determine whether we will fight for them. This means that Boy With a Ball is called to care about not only youth and families in at-risk communities but also people in middle income and higher income situations as well. On another level, even if we were to limit our focus to working with youth and families living in poverty, we have seen that we cannot help them thrive without also fighting for their neighborhood, their community, their city and their country to flourish.  We believe that poverty is not the problem of the poor but the problem of an entire people, requiring that an entire society grow their way out of it.