Ana Moser: Shaking Up Sports In Brazil Before the 2016 Summer Olympics

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Carol Erickson

Ana Beatriz Moser is argueably the most famous and talented Brazilian volleyball player of all time. After two decades as a professional athlete who won many Olympic and World Championship medals, she could have entered into quiet retirement. Instead, Moser is making a lot of noise, trying to reform the way Brazil views sport and physical education by making sports accessible to children of all socioeconomic groups.

The Brazilian school system does not promote sports for education or recreation. In Brazil, sports are considered the purview of the elite and high-performing professional athletes. This approach can be traced to the country’s military government of the 1960s, which promoted stellar athletes as symbols of a powerful nation.
 
Schools did not have to include physical education in their academic curriculum until the 1990s, and those programs continue to be weak. Physical education is generally considered either a way to occupy students’ time or a worthy activity for a small number of highly talented children.
 
Moser, however, takes a polar opposite approach. To her, sports are an essential tool for teaching all children teamwork, critical thinking skills, civic engagement, and healthy lifestyle habits. Through her Institute of Sports and Education (IEE), Moser not only makes quality physical education available to children, particularly in low-income communities, but she also trains community educators in physical education. 
 

See more sports innovations in the Changemakers/Nike Changing Lives Through Football competition.

Since its founding in 2001, the IEE has conducted programs for 12,000 children, trained 1,000 people to become physical education teachers, and worked with hundreds of schools and community organizations. It has built 15 sports and recreation centers, all in an effort to change the philosophy of sports being relevant only to the elite.

 
“When I finished my professional career, I had already developed an idea to start a sports project that focused on social inclusion," Moser said. "Not inclusion in the sense that it was for poor people, but that it addressed people with different athletic abilities. I wanted to look at these differences and adapt training, equipment, space and class instruction to work with all types of people.”
 
 
Moser and a group of friends created IEE when they found a company that wanted to fund a “sports for all” promotion program. As they were developing the plan, the idea of creating a “sports for all” program in low-income communities was born. Moser views this as the “revolutionary” moment, when she realized any program had to be more than sports alone, but also needed to include health, culture, citizenship, empowerment, and community engagement activities as well.
 
IEE is guided by this principle of inclusion, where everyone – students, teachers, and community members – participate in developing the teaching methodology and learning about a sport. Everyone becomes responsible for the planning, management, execution, evaluation, and continuity of the programs and projects.  
 
“At IEE we don’t work specifically with gender," Moser said. "In fact, gender is part of the principle and premise of diversity.” She offers a an example of inclusion: “Our projects have mixed sport classes where boys and girls play together, from the very young age of six or seven, which is easier, until the ages of twelve to fourteen, when boys and girls start to become more physically different.
 
“In the past it was taboo to have boys and girls playing together – there were always separate male and female teams. But based on IEE’s educational principle, we included boys and girls in the same group, as an opportunity for learning. 
 
"Under this model, a boy attacks more strongly when he knows he will meet a strong boy on the other side of the net. He attacks more lightly when he meets a girl. Even in purely sports terms, this is a development strategy, because the student will develop a broader view of the game, and realize that learning to attack with more or less power contributes a lot towards his technical skills as a player.” 
 
 
Moser is the daughter of Italian and German immigrants, and was born in the Brazilian countryside of Blumenau, Santa Catarina. “Sports have been part of my life since I was seven years-old,” she said. “I was a professional athlete for 15 years, was athletic before becoming a professional, and have continued to play sports after I retired.
 
"Sports are part of my life, just as music or gardening is part of other people’s lives. Many of the values and habits I developed through sports taught me to overcome barriers – sports can do this in anyone’s life.”
 
For Moser, sports are more than a healthy practice – they are the process through which people learn about their limits and talents. She was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2007 for her innovative work. “Aside from learning about yourself, you are working collectively with other people, in collaborative games with collective strategies," she said. "This creates an atmosphere that is highly educational. 
 
"With sport, we use our body which is our greatest vehicle for expression, because it is through our body that we communicate with the world. Sport enables a process of education, information, and communication, giving a person the skills and conditions to face the world in the best possible way.”
 
Carlos Souza, a resident of the outskirts of Sao Paulo, attended one of IEE’s programs for four years. "When I came to the project, I was an ordinary boy from a poor community with little culture, and in a lot of trouble," he said. "I never liked taking orders – maybe only from my parents."
  
 
By practicing sports, and receiving the support of his instructors who challenged him to develop goals and find his balance, Souza gradually developed self-confidence. "One teacher noticed that I loved to draw and asked me to work on panels and posters," he said. "She started to make me believe in myself because she knew that every kid has potential, if given the opportunity."
 
Souza attended a multimedia design course and participated in several talent contests. "Today, I work for the Institute of Sports and Education, managing the organization's website and information technology," he said. "I am a new guy because of a social project that truly believes we can write our future with our own ideas. I learned to be critical and independent, and am very grateful for the opportunity and trust that were given to me.”
 
For Moser, participation in Changemakers is one more opportunity to enrich her work and impact the lives of more people like Souza. “The Changemakers competition challenges our imagination and creativity," she said.
 
"It is a test on how to present our ideas, stimulating us to create new projects or share and review existing ones. In the case of women in sports, this theme is rarely presented as a field of action, and it is an reflective opportunity where we can contribute our issues and ideas to help promote gender equality.”
 
The selection of Brazil to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games has created another challenge for Moser. The Brazilian government is expressing the same 1960s dictatorship vision that its sports focus should revolve around the training of elite professional athletes to prepare for the games.  Now Mosher must demonstrate even more convincingly to governments, the private sector, and civil society that sport is about much more than just winning medals: it’s about conquering new life opportunities and offering all people democratic paths towards social inclusion.
 
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