Medellin and Empire Fighting Chance

Recently we took a small team to visit Medellin in Colombia.?This purpose of the trip was to facilitate a knowledge exchange and to look to work together. We also became the first UK organisation to officially partner Medellin Resilente. ?

To save you time In the coming days and months we will be talking in more detail about what we will do – this is more a personal blog!

Why did we go? We want to make the biggest difference we can. That is it.?

Empire Fighting Chance started because we wanted to help.?Initially this help was focused on two young people – those who know the story understand that we didn’t want to run a charity, but here we are. ?

We saw things that were not right and thought we could make a difference at some level.

We have done things our way, not always the most efficient, definitely not always right, often at personal expense (we didn’t know we could get grants at first!) and we challenge people’s perceptions. ?The main one being boxing – despite the fact all our charitable work uses non-contact boxing to make a change.

We have been supported by Bristol.

Former Mayor George Ferguson helped us enormously through the asset transfer process. Mayor Marvin Rees has done for us what he does for many others, quietly or publicly, supported young people and events.

The city has rallied when we suffered loss, when we needed young people to have support and when we first became a charity.

Despite city wide support nearly all our money has been and continues to be external. Main sources are public donations, corporate and multiple national funders. We have received very little funding from Bristol City Council in the last eight years, simply because it doesn’t work for us.

We run three intensive psychologically informed programmes all using non contact boxing as the hook:

• Box Champions – psychologically informed programme
• Box Therapy – therapy being delivered outside clinic walls
• Box Careers – helping young people frame their future differently

We have boxing clubs across the UK using our programmes (free of charge) and we are supporting them on their journey. Between us, we worked with over 5,000 young people last year.

Why am I writing all this? Because what we have done isn’t enough.

Young people and families are still struggling.

We are seeing more referrals, the last 4 months have been successive record totals, and the waiting list is growing despite the fact we have the highest number of delivery staff ever – and it still isn’t enough.

Recently, I asked for a breakdown of referrals for the previous month – 78% have issues with their mental health, over 50% were involved in violence and were on the verge of or had been excluded from school.

I have been involved with a project around possible global solutions to youth violence. Violence is complex and solving it requires different players. However, all participants - whether cities or organisations - talked about things such as disadvantage, poverty, and exploitation.

This cut across the group – we were the only UK organisation taking part, yet we all experienced the same drivers for violence, whether we came from Medellin, Los Angeles, or Bristol.

So, again, how did the trip happen?

Over the last eight months I listened to and exchanged ideas with Santiago, the CEO of Medellin Resiliente. Santiago has worked across the world on violence reduction, including with Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

We spoke about different approaches to reducing violence, the barriers to these ideas and how sports-based models have proved so successful. ?

I wanted to know what could we do better, and what could I learn?

We realised that there were significant advantages to becoming partners, having an ongoing knowledge exchange, working together in each other’s cities to tackle youth violence.

Without wishing to dwell too much on the past, Medellín has gone through a massive transformation in the 30 years since its status as the murder capital of the world in 1991, when 16 people were killed every day. In 2022 there were ‘only’ 319 violent deaths.

Some of the things we learned include:

·??????Our model and programme delivery stacks up with any I have seen.

·??????Medellin thought sport was an extremely important way to transform communities. I believe we are one of the organisations leading the way with our sports delivery.?

·??????Medellin invested in communities not centralised services. ?They brought opportunities, education, health care, etc. to the people, not away from them.

·??????They brought in transport hubs so everyone could access services.?These rapid transport hubs, cables cars, etc. brought the city together.

We will talk as a charity about what we will do both today and in the coming weeks but what I know is that we will change, we will keep pushing to try and improve our delivery and increase access to services.

Young people deserve better, Bristol deserves better, and I know us and the other brilliant organisations in the city will work together to deliver it.

You can read more about our knowledge exchange to Medellin here:

https://www.empirefightingchance.org/2023/03/07/lessons-from-medellin/