Marcus Bernard (left), a fourth-year media communications student, teaches English to a student in the Dominican Republic during an alternative reading week trip he took there three years ago.
Marcus Bernard (left), a fourth-year media communications student, teaches English to a student in the Dominican Republic during an alternative reading week trip he took there three years ago.
Marcus Bernard knows well the power of a soccer ball.
Show up somewhere – anywhere – with one in hand, and one thing happens.
“You’ll make friends,” Bernard says.
The fourth-year media communications student will channel the football’s camaraderie-creating magic this summer when he heads to the Dominican Republic, several soccer balls in hand, with the goal of changing lives one kick at a time.
Bernard is the founder of Soccer for Change, a charity that will host its first camp in the developing Caribbean nation this July. While he’s going to teach children how to bend the ball like Lionel Messi, Bernard is certain the sport will impart more than how to dominate on the pitch.
It will show participants how to win at life.
“The goal of the camp is not to develop the best soccer player the Dominican Republic has ever seen. It’s to use soccer as a vessel to develop other important skills,” he says.
Think team building, handling adversity, and dedication, to name a few.
“We’re going to be unique in driving home important skills children need for the future.”
And ultimately, there’s nothing Bernard wants to do more than to give the children he’ll meet this summer the hope that whatever lies ahead of them can be positive. That’s no easy feat in a country plagued by staggering poverty.
Bernard’s eyes were opened to the vast gulf between rich and poor in the Dominican Republic during his first year at Brock. He participated in alternative reading week programming through Outreach360, an orphanage education outreach organization, and headed south to teach English to school children there.
He was reluctant to go but at the behest of his parents, he abandoned his own comfort zone for seven days and saw what can happen when we look beyond our own myopias.
When Bernard arrived and “saw how the other side of the world was living,” he started figuring out ways he could try to better the lives of his hosts rather than counting down the days until he could return to the comforts of home in Canada.
Marcus Bernard (right) plays basketball with a boy in the Dominican republic.
During the day, he worked with children on their language skills. In the evenings, he spent time being a kid with his protégés. He played soccer with them, went for bike rides and accepted invitations to join in the popular playground pastime of a game of whips.
“It was really difficult to see these kids playing in the environment they were playing in. They played on a cement playground,” Bernard recalls. “A lot of them didn’t have shoes, but they all had a smile.”
That power of play – the joy it evokes that transcends all else in that moment – struck Bernard as much as the income inequality he witnessed. He returned home grateful for his parents’ tenacity and determined to help the people he met. He just wasn’t sure how.
Clarity came the following summer when he tried out for and made Trinidad and Tobago’s U20 World Cup soccer team. When he arrived, he stepped on the field and exemplified good sportsmanship by shaking the coach’s hand. In return, the midfielder from Canada (Bernard’s father, Glenn, was born in Trinidad) was isolated, bullied, shoved around on the pitch and was never passed the ball.
He was 18 and on his own, but resilient. After two weeks of showing the fight he had within him, Bernard was told he’d have to stay another three months to secure his spot on the team and he’d have to play forward.
He did both and helped carry the team through two rounds of qualifying play.
“It really showed me a lot about myself as a person,” Bernard says. “If you set a challenge for yourself, regardless of whether you accomplish your goal or fall short, you learn so much about yourself…. I don’t like to use fail. I don’t fail. I learn.”
Marcus Bernard (centre) with children in the Dominican Republic.
Bernard, who has played soccer since he was three, realized he could use sport in the same way to empower others, specifically those children who made such an impression on him in the Dominican Republic. So he set about establishing Soccer for Change and partnered with Outreach360 to run a pilot camp in Monte Cristi this summer after he graduates. There, he and a group of volunteers will use soccer to empower 50 kids between the ages of 7 and 16.
If the pilot succeeds, Outreach360 will host another camp in December, and expand next summer into Nicaragua. Bernard will be there ensuring everything runs as he envisioned.
But his hopes for all the good soccer could do don’t end there. He dreams of making Soccer for Change a global organization, and bringing portable fields to communities like the one that started this all in the Dominican Republic three years ago.
He sees footballers in premier leagues taking to the field in jerseys bearing the Soccer for Change logo as a show of support, much like they do with humanitarian organization Right to Play.
Mostly, he foresees children having fun and growing as individuals capable of taking on whatever challenges they face in life, all thanks to the power of a soccer ball.
“Soccer is really a universal language. It’s the most played game in the world. Other sports bring the same values but they aren’t as simple to play,” Bernard explains. “Everyone can kick a soccer ball, whether you kick it three feet or 20 feet. Everyone can play at their own level. I think that’s what makes it so universal.”
