Hood Heroes - episode 6: Ernest Edmond or how sport promotes youth engagement
On Saturday morning in a certain corner of Pointe-aux-Trembles, you can hear the noise of young people running in one of the neighborhood's gyms. These are basketball workouts given by the team of the non-profit organization Les Ballons Intensos (LBI), which offers a basketball training camp to young people in various neighborhoods in Montreal. What is the particularity of this service? It is completely free.
The instigator of this project is Ernest Edmond. Arriving from Haiti at the age of six, the coach and founder of LBI has lived all his life in East Montreal, more precisely in Pointe-aux-Trembles. A young basketball player full of ambition, one day he finds unexpected obstacles on his dream course. Hoping to create connections between youth and the community, he sees sport as a brilliant way to engage and give back to young people, while engaging them actively in society.
The birth of the project
It all started in 2008. Barely 18 years old, Ernest then prepared to leave for Florida. He goes there in the hope of joining a university basketball team. “During the selection exams, I was diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia,” he says thoughtfully. I was therefore unable to continue training to join the ranks of a team.” When he returned to Quebec, the young athlete learned more bad news. “I was told that my cousin was dead when I returned from the United States,” he explains. Like me, he has an immigration background and grew up in East Montreal, but he engaged in criminal activities that led to his death...” The death of his cousin, to whom he was very close, upset Ernest. “That year was supposed to be a springboard for me. In the end, it was the other way around.”
The following summer, Ernest moved closer to his cousin who had lost his brother some time before. “Jimmy was 16 and he wanted to join a youth basketball team in the fall. He asked me to train him during the summer, he continues. So, every day during the summer, we went to the park at 6 am. We trained for three or four hours and then I went to work. After two weeks, Jimmy's friends, with whom he spent the rest of his days, noticed an improvement, he said, referring to the improvement of his cousin in basketball. One of Jimmy's friends joined us; he wanted to train with us and see progress. It continued until the end of the summer.” This year was only the beginning, because thanks to word of mouth, several young people joined Ernest and Jimmy. “I put my time into these trainings, because I saw myself in these young people.”
“I noticed that young people liked it; there were a lot of them coming,” he says. He explains that after some time, he found himself with twenty young people under his wing. “The popularity of basketball training among young people struck me. They were there every day at 6 am sharp. They wanted to work hard, he recalls. They had needs to be met, requests related to what they were experiencing, because they could not all join paid teams.” Wanting to meet this need for access to sport among young people, Ernest continues: “At the end of summer 2013, I sat down with them. I asked them, “What exactly do you want?” ” The comments all revolved around the same request: they wanted Ernest to continue to provide quality training for free.
A few years later, the desire of young people was fulfilled and is still continuing to develop. Ernest played a crucial role in responding to community demand: in 2013, he founded Les Ballons Intensives, a free summer camp offering quality basketball training to anyone who is ready to put in the effort. Inspired by his personal experience, Ernest gives his time to young people and is committed to them. “In some ways, through the time I devote to them, I see it as a reward for their motivation and effort.”
Basketball as a model of citizen engagement
His years of experience as a coach with neighborhood youth have allowed Ernest to better understand what new generations are going through. “I grew up in East Montreal, in a neighborhood that was a bit forgotten and abandoned, but I had a different background. I played basketball, but also theater. I was very involved in my school council and I was in an enriched program. Other young people have had more atypical, more difficult careers, I am aware of that,” he explains. However, this is one of the reasons why he wants to make quality sport accessible to as many young people as possible, regardless of the experience they are living.
Over time, more and more people are taking under his wing. “As time went by, young people shared their concerns and problems with me. There are notions of citizen participation that developed, in the sense that they asked questions: “Why don't we change our basketball nets? Why don't we have a functioning water fountain in our parks?” ”, he reports. The more his students develop in sport, the more they become aware of the problems around them. “Young people notice concerns. They did not previously have the opportunity to be actively involved in the community; most of them came from different, disadvantaged backgrounds. There were language barriers, financial barriers that prevented them from participating,” he continues. For the coach, the lack of engagement opportunities is a problem. It is therefore essential to create these means of involvement.
“We're going to become a model of engagement, and we're going to do a Shift so that it turns into youth engagement. We are going to use sport to get young people to be more involved in their community.” These were the words that Ernest said in 2013, when he wanted to encourage young people in his neighborhood to give back to their community. For him, this wish is even more relevant today, in a context where young people are more disconnected than ever from certain issues and where there are unique problems in certain more disadvantaged neighborhoods.
When asked about the involvement of young people, the coach from Pointe-aux-Trembles explains that he wants to develop the commitment of young people in various ways. Based on his experience, he sees commitment at various levels. “My team and I wanted to dissect our approach. Approaching engagement in several steps, as we do with sport,” explains the founder of Ballons Intensos. He adds that, based on a sports model, commitment can be both personal and professional and that, through basketball, “young people can contribute to improving the image of sport and the environment in which they practice it.”
Be sensitive to community realities
“One of the main demands of young people is to have free activities, because not all of their parents can pay for them,” says Ernest. Coming from an abandoned neighborhood himself and having faced personal challenges, the coach explains that free admission is a key element in making sport accessible to young people, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
And while he insists on the issue of free services, this does not mean that the quality of the service offered should be lower. For Ernest, “free and accessible must not go hand in hand with Cheap and of poor quality.” He is firm: “I don't want people to associate the free involvement of young people with a disadvantaged environment. When I look for funding, for example, I rely on the fact that donors are not funding a problem, but a solution.”
“There are parents who want to pay us for the services we offer to their children, but I refuse all the time. I don't want basketball to be paid for, and I don't want there to be youth classes. On the field, everyone is at the same level,” continues Ernest. “We don't ask for anything; only the involvement and effort of young people,” adds the coach. While some parents are willing to pay for their children to have access to extracurricular sports activities, others are not able to. Faced with these different realities, Ernest explains the following: “Some parents don't speak the language, others have several jobs at the same time — all this makes accessibility difficult. For me, Intensive Balloons is a way of giving the same chance to all young people.”
Changing the perception of young people and basketball
Basketball often has a negative image. For Ernest, “there has always been a negative culture associated with sport.” What motivated him to get involved in committed sport was his desire to break the negative stereotypes associated with basketball.
Ernest says that, despite the evolution of the perception of sport in disadvantaged areas, justice is still not being done justice to the positive effects that sports activities have on the community. “When I was younger, we often hung out in a particular park to play basketball,” he reports. It was called the “dragon park” in Pointe-aux-Trembles. It was surrounded by houses, and one day, the City decided to close this park because residents were complaining about the noise. It was the only place you could play basketball in the area. We found it a bit insulting because it didn't happen to other sports fields in other neighborhoods. Now, we are therefore trying to meet the need of young people to have access to basketball courts everywhere in the neighborhoods.”
“When we talk about youth engagement, it's important to talk about positive influence in the community,” says Ernest, continuing his momentum. I don't want people to see children who participate in community activities as children with problems, but as children who are worth the effort.”
“Not everyone can get involved”
Involved in his community for years, the coach seeks to give back to those who make efforts and who are committed. “There are plenty of ways to measure the effect of young people in their neighborhood,” says Ernest. “My ideal is that, in the communities where we work, young people take ownership of the project. There is nothing more beautiful than this moment when a young person asks to get involved, asks to expand the project in his neighborhood,” he says, with stars in his eyes.
According to Ernest, there is a reality that we often forget when we talk about citizen engagement. “I would like us to review neighborhood engagement too, because it is an elitist concept nonetheless. Not everyone can get involved. When you come from a certain background or are financially precarious, it is not easy to participate voluntarily in the life of the community,” he explains. He draws attention to the accessibility of engagement, a concept that everyone should work on. “Committing somewhere requires more than time. It's more demanding, it involves sacrifices. It needs to be easier for young people to participate,” he adds. On a more optimistic note, he acknowledges that the engagement of young people in neighborhoods through sport has increased significantly. “Every year, the number of young people who want to join us increases. We started with 20 young people in a single district. Today, there are more than 300 young people in 4 districts of the city,” the citizen rejoices. “My dream is to see more and more young people solve the problems of their community by being creative and showing leadership,” says Ernest.
“We think that young people in the neighborhoods are part of the solutions, because they live it every day, they understand it,” he concludes. For him, community involvement remains essential, but he nevertheless reiterates the importance of action. “Young people must have expectations. In front of others and in front of themselves. When they have high expectations, it pushes them to take action and change things, he explains. Training my cousin was a very small favor. But if I hadn't acted at that time, none of this would have been possible.”