About
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Who We Are
We come from where we want to help!
Marcos & Gianluca: We are childhood friends that met on the basketball court and forged a friendship based on the efforts we placed on the court to achieve our goals, and the values absorbed from our families that made us alike, receiving sport scholarships enabling us to carve our path to success.
We explains our stories from our heart to you this as a reader trying to give you the confidence to believe in this cause, representing the example of what we trying to achieve with this foundation, from us that with hard work have pushed beyond our abilities using sport as a channel and contributor to peak performance and excellence pursue in life, with a mission to pass this opportunity to next generations.
Foundation Sports4Opportunities with Registration Number 8000018818 in Colombian Chamber of Commerce.
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The Team
Who helps driving this mission
Who is Marcos and what is his story?
I was born and raised in Colombia in a lower-mid class family who provided me with the best assets I could get: key values, role models and a fire to overcome difficulties, and I currently live in Switzerland.
In my professional life I hold executive positions in multi-national companies, where most of my peers comes from top universities or high executive roles in recognized organizations, not even in my wildest dreams I would have imagined shared ideas with them.
I have visited and worked in every continent and met amazing people that fueled my determination to succeed. I’m constantly working in be my best version to chase my life purpose. I love sports, currently triathlon. Using it as the channel to push my performance limits, with the goal to carry out to all my life and try to be the best I can.
Sports gave me access to university in form of a scholarship, My vision is to achieve my dreams through discipline and build the soft skills to thrive in life and serve as an example. And most recently the essential mission to form this foundation and pass this opportunity to the next generations.
Gian Luca Bacci
Co-Founder Sports4Opportunities
Who is Gian Luca and what is his story?
My name is Gianluca Bacci, i was born in Barranquilla (Colombia) during the late 80´s as the first grandson of Italian inmigrants. Thanks to my family and the environment where I was raised and educated, I learned many values that shaped the man who I am, honesty, discipline and sacrifice are core principles when describing myself. Despite growing in a high-income family, I was, since a very young age, very aware and sensitive of the big inequalities of the society where I was living in.
Sports, which I have been very passionate with, since my early years, helped me to experience from first hand these inequalities. All these years involved in the world of sports has given me a wide perspective of the lack of opportunities that many teenagers have in our country, and in many cases is not only because of the athlete mindset but also due to a system that’s doesn’t work properly, and the idea with our foundation is to help those kids willing to succeed in life, that are passionate with sports, but don’t have the means to study at a university.
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THE PROBLEM?
What are we trying to contribute towards?
It is extremely hard to gain access to higher education (University) for kids in low socio-economic families (>75% of population*) in Colombia. Due to high educational costs, scarce access to economical resources, poor governmental funding and a low number of public universities.
With the current socio-economical gap accelerating, it leaves the kid’s future with small chances of success for their professional & personal growth and their future families forward.
This forces them to become low skilled labor earning low salaries (<US$5,50 per day), which neither allows them to further study while working nor enables them to provide higher education for their future kids, perpetuating the problem over generations.
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WHY WE DO IT?
FOR A BETTER FUTURE
As we reflect into our life journey, we saw some kids with talent and vision that did not have the same opportunities. Since this inequality remains today, our aim with this foundation is to live our mission of giving back as a contribution to lift society by creating educational opportunities to reduce inequality
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HOW WE DO IT?
Program Structure, Selection, oversight and mentoring
Selection Process:
it occurs through five stages, to determinate the right candidate among pre-selected kids.
Assignation:
Kids that pass the criteria Once scholarship is awarded, mentoring and progress review is reported quarterly to evaluate the health of the program and participants
Internal and external oversight:
As part of the program, the finances, educational and process metrics are validated quarterly and key reports are shared with donors.
Mentoring:
We understand that to thrive in life, support beyond economics is key for which we embrace our young kids with mentoring on their personal and educational matters, and would like you to have this chance too.
