Fostering Healthy Environments For the Youth
After more than 15 years of working towards the advancement of Positive Youth Development initiatives in Colombia, Eduardo De la Vega-Taboada made the transition into academia. Driven by his avid dedication to applying developmental psychology, he shifts his focus now on empowering the youth and parents in underserved communities. Through extensive interviews and analysis, Eduardo discovers the profound impact violence has on adolescents in these communities. He finds that after school programs, in this case soccer, have emerged as safe spaces for the vulnerable youth — largely thanks to local coaches who understand the importance of these spaces. Eduardo’s work reveals the significance of these programs on children and adolescents going through their essential developmental years.
Audio Transcript:
Eduardo is an engineer and PhD student in developmental sciences psychology, here at Florida International University and he utilizes developmental psychology as a tool for improving the experiences of individuals living in communities where there is poverty and violence. So I started doing this research with other co workers in a semi rural community in Colombia 5000, habitants, high levels of poverty. And 92% of the people were on the were below the poverty line in Colombia, and then lack of services, like a lot of violence also happening in the community. That was like the broad perspective of the community, then we went in, and we did in this case, four focus groups with the adolescents of the community, and we would, and what we found in that first approach, and there is a paper that I wrote with other colleagues about that is that the adolescents are highly exposed to violence, we somehow expected that and they are highly exposed to violence, also in their houses, so there’s a lot of familiar violence. And then when they go out in their community, there is a lot of violence in the streets, and the only place in which they feel safe, where the park when, and it was important when there was something happening in the park, regarding like a group, for example, like a soccer group, like a soccer school, like a soccer training, and mostly related with soccer and with sports for the boys and for the girls were more about when there was like a dance a course happening, or like a dance group, but the one that are most likely higher exposed to community violence, meaning fist fighting, or even like fighting with knife and those kinds of things are in adolescence, boys, they are like 92% of the one that get in during a fight with knife are in boys. So I wanted to know more about this in spaces that are somehow created by coaches that are from the community and that organically are being like organizing these in soccer groups. And then that’s why I went into this soccer or soccer for development programs investigation after that. So then after that, I began doing research with a soccer for development program that was happening here in in South Florida. It was an NGO that started in Colombia 15 years ago, and now it came to South Florida and they are in a vulnerable population. They are using soccer to promote a social emotional learning and to create safe spaces for kids. And also I went back to Colombia, and they interviewed the coaches, community coaches for a particular city in Colombia in the Caribbean coast. And I did like 16 interviews of this community coaches to understand what was like their way of working, what was the impact what was the motivation behind the things that they were doing. And also, I interviewed the one of the most important NGOs working for soccer for development in Colombia, interview 10 of those leaders of those like big organizations, so I did the big organizations, interviews, and also community coaches that are more like organically interviews, the motivations of the community coaches are really interesting, because there is a part of that. It’s also a self preservation motivation, which is really new in this research. And it means that they know that if they work with the youth, meaning the kids and the adolescents that are in their neighborhood that are playing in their soccer field, that it’s close to their house, they are gonna create a safer, safer environment for them and for their families. There is also this conversation in those communities about the respect the community have to the soccer coaches, because people do not mess with them somehow. These coach has created something that it’s a set of values in while the kids are in the school and those set of values are somehow incentivizing non violent behaviors. So for example, this coaches and all of the coaches, almost all of the coaches that I interviewed, they said that they when when kids fight, for example, between each other, when they do like rude things towards each other, they, like punish that. And also when they do things that are like pro social, they give them like rewards. They are creating a new culture, different to what the culture is outside of that school, and the culture, it’s outside of the school. Unfortunately, in this community, it’s it’s a lot about, like, if you have this concurrent domination attitude you are the better the kids to be successful. Within this concept of the School of the soccer school, they have to behave differently, those type of things are the things that later on will translate into their daily life and into their houses and all of those things. There are sometimes these coaches are saying that a lot of those kids went out of their hands, meaning that even if they went, they were into the sports school, let’s say the environment of them in terms of the attractiveness of the drug world in which they can like make money easier, took them out of these healthy developmental pathways. So there are also examples of that and one of the things that the coaches claim is that the lack of support, let’s say governmental support, or even economic support for other organizations, didn’t allow them to engage those adolescents in better. Those examples are so painful for them when they feel they lose a kid into the world of criminal organizations delinquency. Because they know that that kid will die sooner. They know that he will go into criminal organizations and they will go into violence and then it’s very likely that kid will be killed. So the first one for me was that the only safe spaces the adolescents have were soccer programs, not church, not libraries, not their houses. No, it’s like the soccer game that’s happening in the field and the importance of someone like an adult there to create safe space because if the soccer was happening without an adult, it wasn’t safe for them. They’re just playing but they were scared when kids don’t have safe spaces their their brain. Do not develop into a healthy way.
