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CONTRIBUTE BLOGS
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by Marcia Stepanek
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02/16/2009 07:24
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I just finished reading an
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People
Kick-starting Change
In homeless soccer, it's about
getting back in the game
 Courtesy Street Soccer USA
FORGET THE OLYMPICS. Lawrence Cann (pictured, above) is focused on a tougher sort of international playing field.
Cann is the founder of Charlotte, N.C.-based Street Soccer USA—the nation’s first soccer league comprised entirely of homeless men from around the country. The four-year-old league, made up of 11 teams from 11 cities, plays for emotional and economic victories, Cann says—but the way they play the game, pretty much everybody wins.
“When the homeless play soccer or do something we don’t expect,” Cann says, “we realize that they are just like non-homeless people—human beings struggling, and we can connect with them in a new way. And guess what? When we do that, real issues facing the homeless start to get attention.”
It’s already happening. Kicking It, a documentary film about the expanding homeless soccer movement, premiered at the Sundance International Film Festival (see "Featured Video" at right). Producer/Director Susan Koch says she made her film to raise international awareness about Cann and the homeless sports movement. “On the field, [the homeless players] begin to think of themselves as soccer players rather than as homeless people to be shunned by society,” says Koch. “[They get] a chance to be part of a team, to belong, to be part of a community—something people who are homeless often lack. Their perceptions of themselves change—and our perceptions of them change, too.”
Soccer was a major force in Cann’s life, too. He began playing in the streets of his family’s Richmond, Va., neighborhood when he was six years old. He remembers watching the World Cup in Italy with his friends as a boy, and being inspired to form a street team. Then, when he was in high school, Cann organized a more formal World Cup-style tournament for kids aged 6-13—complete with team names and painted flags. “It wasn’t so much about being entrepreneurial back then,” Cann says. “For me, it was more about creating a community and just playing the game.”
Cann’s passion for the game continued, and in college, he played on the soccer team at Davidson College, where he graduated in 2000 with undergraduate degrees in English and Spanish. Cann got his first job teaching English as a second language at a high school in Sapporo, Japan, then returned to the States two years later to lead a community arts program for Charlotte’s non-denominational Urban Ministry Center. Two years later, he founded Street Soccer USA as part of the Center’s homeless aid initiative and has been leading that program ever since.
Courtesy Street Soccer USA
The U.S. National Team that will compete in the
2008 Homeless World Cup this December in Melbourne, Australia
Setting up the Center’s soccer program wasn’t easy at first: Cann got a lot of pushback from some of his colleagues: not everyone immediately understood why he wanted to spend the Center’s money sending homeless people to Scotland to attend their first Homeless World Cup soccer game. “Some of the other employees also felt…that we shouldn’t make it too comfortable for the homeless or they’ll have no incentive to move on to build lives of their own,” Cann says—but “homelessness isn’t comfortable no matter how you slice it.”
After successfully using soccer to help get some homeless men off the streets of Charlotte, Cann eventually won over most of his colleagues. Now, every year, Cann takes an all-star team of the best homeless players to the Homeless World Cup, showing the world they have abilities far beyond society’s low expectations. “The goal isn’t to have happier homeless people,” Cann says. “It’s to have fewer of them.”
Cann knows what it means to be homeless. His family’s home burned down when he was nine years old. “We were technically homeless, living with my grandmother,” he said. “All I remember is that we saw all of our family more often after the fire than usual. We had insurance – a safety net. Not everyone is so lucky” to have a family or a source of money that they can fall back on in tough times, Cann says.
Cann also knows a bit about what it means to be poor. At the age of 19, while at Davidson, he won an international studies scholarship to Cameroon, in Africa, and worked as a translator for doctors and patients at a hospital in Enongal. “I saw poverty there that exceeded anything I had ever seen in my life, and it changed me, “ he said. “You can read about [poverty] all you want and think you get it, but after you see it around you in real life, it makes you want to help.”
While Cann hopes to help as many homeless as he can, not everyone makes the World Cup teams he puts together with his younger brother, Rob. Anyone can join a team, Cann says—but those who want to stay there need to work at getting their lives back together.
“We have old guys who stink; their soccer ability ranges from zero to excellent” Cann says. But what distinguishes those who remain on the team, he says, is “a desire to move forward from homelessness.” If that hunger for change exists, he says, “we then work to help them beat the homeless time horizon, where they are just living day-to-day.”
Social workers work with each player to set weight loss goals, help them to stop smoking, and teach them about nutrition. For team members recovering from drug addiction, it’s clear that any relapse will mean suspension from the team. It’s a powerful incentive, Cann says. Of the 23 players who have traveled to the Homeless World Cup so far, 19 are no longer homeless, and of the 40-130 players in the league at any given time, Cann estimates that at least three-fourths of them eventually get off the street—men like Zenas Fuell, whom Cann recalls had been deaf and angry, but who had wanted to get on the team so badly that he agreed to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, which led to other tests. Eventually, Cann says, Fuell was able to get on disability, move off the street, and get a job at a pizza parlor. Today, Fuell no longer plays on the team. Why? “He’s no longer homeless,” says Cann.
Ray Isaac, 50, is another success story. Isaac was one of the homeless players from the 2005 U.S. team that traveled to Scotland; he’s now working with Cann as an outreach worker at Street Soccer USA and serves as a spokesman for the team, the first player Cann hired to work at the Center. Cann feels a special kinship to Isaac: like Cann, Isaac’s family home burned down when Isaac was younger. Cann mentored Isaac during his first months at the Center and, after encouraging him to practice his talent as a painter, Isaac joined the soccer team and made the all-star team in 2005. Isaac hasn’t looked back since. “I thought it was off the wall that I made the [Homeless World Cup soccer] team,” Isaac recalls. “I didn’t know anything about all these other countries and suddenly, I found myself going [to Scotland], kicking a soccer ball. Suddenly, all my problems didn’t really seem like problems anymore.”
Cann says he is looking forward to this year’s Homeless World Cup tournament in Melbourne, Australia, where the best homeless players from around the world will compete. “I’m convinced that homeless soccer is one of the most cost-effective ways to create social change,” Cann says.
So far, so good. Cann’s already making that goal.
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