VIDEO: Marcellus Baz speaks about his experience visiting the favelas Brazil
Nottingham’s Switch Up charity founder Marcellus Baz, who turned his life around after a tough upbringing to encourage young adults to avoid crime, has returned from Brazil where he took part in an international conference on tackling gang violence.
Speaking to Notts TV, Marcellus talked about youth crime, opportunities that are available to young people in Nottingham and his experiences in Rio, where he met other charity workers and vistited Rio’s notorious favelas, where drugs and gang crime are rife
“I‘ve seen a lot of things in my life but in Brazil I saw some really difficult things.
There were kids as young as 12 and 14 walking around with AK47s. There were stalls within the middle of the favelas where kids were selling cocaine and crack cocaine like we would sell fruit and vegetables.
Kids as young as seven and eight would be lookouts for rival gangs or for police.
If police were to come into the favelas, they would let fireworks off to let everyone know.
Having said that, the work that Fight for Peace are doing over there is incredible and I take my hat off to them.
I was privileged and humbled to get this chance
They took us into the favelas to give us a firsthand experience of what gang violence is like over there and the difficulties that are faced.
I was privileged and humbled to get this chance to experience working with young people coming from favelas.
We got chosen as an organisation from the UK doing work with young people from areas of deprivation who are into crime or are on the cusp or crime by UNESCO, UNICEF and Fight for Peace.
The conference in Rio had representatives from all around the world discussing violence prevention and how sport can open doors for these organisations.
It gives young people a different opportunity for a chance and obviously we don’t want young people going down the wrong path.
Getting experience and knowledge from these organisations and bringing it back to Nottingham is amazing for us.
Gang violence is an issue all around the world
It will let us do more work to lead young people away from a life of crime.
It is evident that gang violence is an issue all around the world because of the organisations around the world that were at this conference, and I formed some real strong relationships and partnerships.
The issues that we all face are very similar, such as dysfunctional families, not having access to opportunities, negative role models and lack of education.
To be able to overcome those issues and to now help young people and support these people in that we can make a positive change to them.
It’s about logically thinking about things.
Boxing gave me aspirations to do better
I found a lot of positive role models and sport has been a massive outlet for me.
Predominantly boxing has given me a way of venting anger and any kind of ingrained hurt.
It gave me aspirations to do better in my life and from that I went on and I wanted to make a change.
I wanted to be able to support others and to do that, you must lead the way.
There’s Nottingham School of Boxing which is a charity that opens its doors to everybody to support them and to help with self-esteem and confidence.
Switch Up is a community interest organisation and it gives additional support around employment, job readiness, counselling, trauma management, education and peer mentoring.
We want to help everybody
We want a thriving Nottingham where people can enjoy themselves and so that we don’t have gang issues and that we haven’t got people hurting others.
That’s why the two organisations work in tandem.
We have many opportunities for testimony, where young people can talk about their experiences, which can really be life changing.
We are funded by Sport England to deliver more than boxing now as we now have more people who have not been able to access these sports in areas of deprivation that we work in.
Sport England through the community activation sports scheme has provided these opportunities.
We want to help everybody and anybody.
