love.fútbol Inaugurates its First Sports Space in Baltimore

Baltimore, MD - November 13th, 2023 - love.fútbol, a nonprofit organization leading a global effort to build communities while closing the youth play equity gap, announces the opening of a new sports space in Baltimore, Maryland. The opening celebration started with an early morning community-led building session on Saturday the 11th of November and continued with opening games and performances in the afternoon.

Since 2007, love.fútbol has been empowering residents to lead the creation of their own sports spaces in underserved communities worldwide—building, as they say, #MoreThanAPlaceToPlay. Having led grassroots sports space projects across five continents, the organization brought its community-driven approach to Baltimore with a project that represents both a landmark and a homecoming moment, as the roots of the organization lay in nearby Washington D.C.

CEO and Co-founder Drew Chafetz said: “After working in diverse communities across the world, it means a lot to bring our mission home. I was fortunate to grow up playing soccer across D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, and later in life, was compelled to do something about the challenges children face to play around the world. But I hadn’t recognized how hard it was for children to play right in my own backyard.”

With the lack of funding for schools and local departments of Parks and Recreation nationwide in the United States, there is a widening gap between who gets to play and who doesn’t. As Kristine Stratton, CEO of the National Park and Recreation Association states, “We know people will be hard-pressed to fund Parks and Recreation, so how do we reinvent what play looks like in an economically-strained context? It’s an exciting opportunity that would lend itself to bring in more volunteers from communities.”

While residents in Sandtown, Baltimore historically found themselves on the latter end of access to play, love.fútbol has helped to invigorate renewed hope in local community members that they hold their own power in delivering playmaking solutions, from the inside-out. With strong ambitions and hopes for their community, the engagement seen in the Sandtown community throughout this project highlights how locals are best positioned to solve their own challenges, as seen by how actively they have participated throughout the planning, construction, and activation process of this sports space.

Housed within the Lilian S. Jones Recreation Center in West Baltimore’s Sandtown, this sports space project provides a supervised space for local youth to play and connect. Now inaugurated, this project will continue to help community members drive their own development through ongoing social programs on the space to address social challenges like health education and violence prevention, critical challenges in Sandtown, and many inner cities across the country. “People see this simply as a court but it is more than a space, it is where friendships grow and it keeps you away from negative things,” says resident Jeremiah Stevenson.

love.fútbol aims to elevate the conversation in the United States about how communities can play a more central role in their own change-making efforts. Involving local volunteers and youth throughout the project process and positioning the community as ongoing managers of the space fosters a sense of pride and ownership within the community that is essential to long-term activation and usage—contributing to raising the bar around sports spaces and their potential to serve as symbols of unity, achievement, and belonging. 

Jayson Green, CEO of the New Song Community Learning Center, a central, local partner to the initiative, added: “This project is centered around "Community Pride", showing our community that there are people and organizations that care about their well-being and allowing locals to be a part of a project that betters their community.”

As love.fútbol continues to expand its footprint across the United States, the Baltimore project joins a list of completed sports space projects in cities such as Philadelphia, PA, Flint, MI, Chicago, IL, and Miami, FL, exceeding its recent milestone of 100,000 people impacted globally.

The project would not have been possible without funding from love.fútbol’s long-standing partner, the Pincus Family Foundation, and collaboration with sponsors ESPN and Beyond Sport, founding partners of the Return to Play Fund, an initiative that uses sports to promote youth mental and physical well-being, address racial inequality, and increase access for Black and Brown youth to play sports. 

About love.fútbol: love.fútbol is a global non-profit dedicated to closing the play equity gap and ensuring every child has a safe space to play sports. The organization employs an award-winning methodology to engage, mobilize, and partner with communities to create, reclaim, and redefine their own sports spaces as sustainable platforms for social change. Since 2006, love.fútbol has partnered with the biggest names in the sports, business, and nonprofit sectors to complete over 60 sports space projects across five continents. Today, more than 100,000 youth and adults have been engaged by the organization to be active, connect, grow, and learn. 

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For media inquiries, please contact:

Paco Hinojosa 

paco@lovefutbol.org