Torino – There are distant lands where boys and girls are forced to struggle daily against enormous problems and difficulties. Places where play and sport are almost impossible utopias. Thus the Ivory Coast, fundraising starts”>Abele Group of Turin, which has been fighting alongside the last for more than 50 years, is launching a project to bring a basketball school for boys and girls to Africa.
“Basketball is the only sport that tends towards the sky. Because of this it is a revolution for those who are used to always looking at the ground“. These are the words made immortal by Bill Russell, monument of world basketball, which inspired the project of the Abele Group: Coast to Costa.
I PROJECTS IN THE IVORY COAST
As the name suggests, the project will be carried out in Grand Bassam, a city on the Ivory Coast. 35 years have passed since the Abele Group arrived in this place and from the beginning gave birth to Abel Community: an experience that was born to offer a possibility of reception and social reintegration to numerous imprisoned minors and who subsequently, in response to the country’s growing political, economic and social crisishas spread to other vulnerable segments of the population such as orphans, street children, war evacuees, victims of human trafficking, victims of labor exploitation and women in difficulty.
The goal is now to bring the right to sport to the boys and girls of Gran Bassam and to succeed in this enterprise the Gruppo Abele, with the Communauté Abel and Mens Sana Siena has launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Gofundme platform. The mission of the project is the purchase of materials such as skittles, balls, jerseys, baskets, scoreboards, as well as the renewal of local structures and finance the participation of 600 Ivorian girls and boys in the summer camp that the Abele Group is setting up for the next July.
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«The dream, not so much forbidden, is to create a real basketball team in the future. In this way we want to bring girls and boys to experience a different competitive spirit than that which often forces them only to deal with basic needs in a context where everything seems a privilege. And we want to try to enhance what someone might think is a leisure and which, on the other hand, is an extra brick of right in the name of relationship, education, physical well-being».
THE COMMUNAUTÉ ABEL: ALPHABETIZATION, INCLUSION AND FIGHT AGAINST DISCRIMINATION
The Communauté Abel has never pretended to approach the African reality as “in need” of interventions from the outside, but was born to be an integral part of a pre-existing social fabric. In fact, the objective is to build together, distinguishing the concept of cooperation from that of help, supporting the African populations on the path towards real autonomy that provides the necessary tools for autonomous and free growth, avoiding intervening according to a welfare logic.
We want to bring girls and boys to experience a different competitive spirit than that which often forces them only to deal with basic needs in a context where everything seems a privilege.
For this reason, the projects also include the involvement of the entire population in recreational, sporting and cultural activities, as well as support services for the most vulnerable. «Our work is made up of contamination, collaboration, exchanges, discussions and networks with public and private entities in the Ivory Coast. Active in literacy processes, fight against discrimination, trafficking and job trainingwe collaborate with NGOs and local associations that share the references that guide us ».
For the realization of the project, alongside the Communauté Abel, there are Mens Sana Basket Academy, which was born in 2019 from a city tradition that makes Siena the capital of Tuscan basketball and Court of Miraclesa cultural association, also from the city of Siena, active in the social field with various activities for children and more.
