Boys' development

While the demand for socially conscious tourism is growing, existing programs don’t take full advantage of experiences before, during and afterward. Art Aids Art’s sustainable tourism model – Community Activism Travel – is unique in engaging travelers and their home communities from the moment a trip is planned, transforming an individual’s excursion into a shared experience benefiting a network of active learners.

Meet our traveler, Ella. Instead of traveling solo to South Africa, Ella takes her community “with her.” Before departure, Ella reads her assigned learning materials. She shares insights, solicits questions and receives input from her Travel Team, a supportive group of friends, family and local school children (recruited with Art Aids Art’s help).

Once she departs, Ella stays in touch through video blog entries, creating a “virtual travel” experience for the Travel Team. Ella takes part in education and small business projects at Home in the ‘Hood, a thriving community center, working side by side with residents of Khayelitsha, and gaining a deep understanding of their entrepreneurial efforts to alleviate poverty. Returning home, she now acts as a Global Advocate.

Waste into Want will provide youth with the opportunity to help create a sculpture garden. Gardens are usually places designed by adults where youth are rarely invited to play. Our garden will be a place where young people can express themselves through the design and creation of sculptures and plant materials with the help of local Pittsburgh artists. They will decorate the path squares and planters and benches with paint and mosaics, and place the plants. The garden will teach youth to enjoy and respect public spaces and art, as well as provide a green refuge in an urban environment. The mosaics will be created with broken stained glass and tile donated by artists and bits of toys or mementos provided by the youth themselves. The use of recycled materials fosters environmental consciousness and encourages seeing the possibility in objects that would normally be cast away as trash.

Soccer Opens Success provides positive enrichment of life skills to disadvantaged youth through the world’s game of Soccer. While S.O.S. strives to make soccer a cornerstone of the educational process, it is but a mere strategy to build the foundation of positive mental outcomes in the lives of under served youth.

S.O.S. will undertake its first global initiative in February 2010 by offering a soccer camp exchange in the northeast Atlantic coastal village of Bilwi (Puerto Cabeza), Nicaragua.

The camp will focus on healthy decision-making, active lifestyles as an asset to keep the youth from the burgeoning drug trade and usage and to become vocal in the pursuit of their own happiness despite the poverty in which they live. As many have before and many more will in the future, S.O.S. is using soccer to make those changes.

The long-term goal of S.O.S. is to foster a relationship, host coaching seminars and acquire equipment and resources to allow the program to become an annual event and become self-sustaining within the next five years.

The innovation is in the bridging of the gap between the under-served youth of our community and the under-served youth of global villages, bound by their love of the world's game: soccer.