The American who takes the climb to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro – 09/28/2023 – É Logo Ali
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American Andrew Lenz, born in Houston, Texas, but for 25 of his 42 years living in Rio de Janeiro, is the creator of a project that combines his passion for the mountains with the desire to make a difference in the scenario of inequalities he encountered when he came with his family to live in the Marvelous City. Founder of CEU (Urban Climbing Center), he takes young people from local communities to enjoy the pleasure and butterflies of their first climbs on the rocks that make up Rio’s beautiful landscape.
Here, he tells a little about CEU’s journey.
How did the CEU project come about? I was born in Houston, Texas, in the United States, and moved here with my father in 1998, I have lived in Rio for 25 years. I started working with social projects in the early 2000s, but projects linked to other things, art , culture. In 2003, I started climbing for leisure and realized how much climbing changed me as a person. I found this change that occurred in myself interesting. So I thought that climbing could be an interesting tool to include in the social projects I was already doing and, in 2010, I founded the Urban Climbing Center.
And how did it start? I started working in the Rocinha favela, which has big rocks on the side. The aim was to give young people and women living in Rio’s favelas more access to an elite sport, but which I really think brings several personal benefits. I graduated as a certified professional climbing instructor and guide in 2010, the same year I founded CEU.
We took young people from Rocinha to take a basic course and learn how to rock climb and, over time, I developed a methodology that went further, climbing alone was not enough to generate the impact I wanted to promote in the lives of the young people who attended the project. They needed other support. Support in relation to school, in relation to mental health, physical health. So, we used the climbing community to create a network of contacts, support and services for young people who participated in the project and who are generally people in situations of social vulnerability, whom we helped to improve self-esteem, self-knowledge, autonomy, in addition to developing skills. social and emotional issues in young people, supporting them in creating citizens better prepared to face the challenges of the future.
Speaking of challenges, what was it like when you arrived in the favela and said, look, let’s climb the rock? At first it was strange, really. I already had experience with other social projects, so I had some contacts in Rocinha, where I wanted to implement the project first, due to its proximity to a large and iconic rock here in Rio. But, at first, it wasn’t easy. Most parents at the time didn’t know about climbing. And most people thought I was actually kind of crazy. They didn’t immediately want to trust a strange person who arrived proposing to take their children up a mountain.
How did you overcome this strangeness? I think what turned the key was realizing that it was better to form partnerships with other projects that already existed, offering a different activity for these projects. I partnered with a surf school in Rocinha, for example, and we continue to use this model with several projects in Rio’s communities. We form partnerships, taking the children from these projects to climb. Anyone who really likes it can sign up for CEU and so on. We help other projects by offering different services and activities, and rely on them as a gateway to getting to know the families and communities in which we operate.
How many communities does CEU work in? Today we are in more than eight different communities, including youth and women. We have young people coming from Rocinha, Turano, Tabajaras, Complexo do Alemão, also from some favellas in Olaria, Realengo, Salgueiro and Borel. In 2020, I closed the climbing wall I had built in Rocinha and brought the project to Botafogo, to a public gym here in Rio. And now we can serve people from several different favelas and regions.
Do you have any idea how many young people you’ve attracted to climbing? We have already introduced the sport to hundreds of young people over these 12 years. Now, we work in different ways. During this time, we did personalized work, with more advanced courses, with more than 20 students. Some became professional athletes, others became climbing instructors, others went to work in areas that had nothing to do with climbing, but to which they were referred by us. For example, I have a student who is now a camera assistant, works in cinema, he already left the project, but he left when we were able to really help him do an internship with the camera, he was interested and we looked for contacts within the climbing community to forward to that work area. Today he is a professional in this field.
This is the great difference of our work. We do not propose to work with hundreds of young people at the same time, but to work with a smaller group and in a deeper way, with a greater impact on the lives of these young people.
How do you finance the project, considering that the equipment is expensive? We support ourselves based on donations, mostly individual and private donations. Most of the equipment is donated by other climbers or through partnerships with groups from other cities, and even from other countries, who collect these materials and send them to us. Recently, we managed to renovate a room in the gym, where we offer tutoring, lectures, and various workshops to increase the quality of service. It also helped to buy a Kombi so we could go on bigger trips with younger people. But the large financing base is still via collective fundraising campaigns, such as through the link www.vakinha.com.br/vaquinha/centro-de-escalada-urbana, this type of support.
And why did you decide to embark on the social sector? We are who we are, it’s difficult to explain, but I think that when I arrived in Brazil, at 17 years old, the impact of inequality here was too great, obvious to anyone, and that affected me. Living in Rio and facing the impacts of social inequality every day made me feel that I needed to do something to help, to try to reverse, even on such a small scale, what I saw around me. That’s what I try to do with CEU.
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