UNISON Northern has had a UIDF bid accepted for a 12 month project which seeks to build on the successful pilot collaboration with NOMADESC and Show Racism the Red Card in Buenaventura, Colombia.
Buenaventura is a port city of around 400,000 inhabitants (around the size of Newcastle) where human rights groups estimate that over 5,000 people have been forcibly disappeared over the past 20 years, mainly by paramilitary groups allied to government forces. As a result, over 100,000 people have fled their homes.
The project is a 12 month community-based youth project which will strengthen community struggles in the areas most affected by violence and threatened with displacement, through the medium of football. Entitled ‘Show Disposession the Red Card: Let’s Play for our Territory’, the project consists of a football tournament and human rights workshops. As well as providing a rare and exciting leisure activity for youth in the communities, the tournament will encourage re-appropriation of public spaces by the participants, trade unions and other community members. It will also seek to contribute to the reconstruction of the social fabric of communities so ravaged by the impact of the violence.
Initiatives such as this demonstrate NOMADESC’s exceptional and unique approach to human rights work with social movements and trade unions. It continues to be of vital importance and a crucial example of working to develop alternatives and strengthen movements in the most testing of circumstances.
A new video on the pilot project has been produced by NOMADESC, which was shown at the last International Committee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlUGSRQrMoo