The Story of Aniko

Hope and community through football

By Where Is Football

April 6^th, 2018

by Dan Teuma, Aniko co-founder

Football has always been a big part of my life. My earliest memory of football is of playing at the age of five or six, back home in Gibraltar. It was a way for me to connect with other kids my age. It gave me a sense of belonging, I suppose.

Over the years, I’ve always played. When I moved to England, it’s what broke down the barriers of me feeling like an outsider. When I visited new places, football allowed me to get to know the communities and the people there, on a different level.

I’ve experienced first hand how 90 minutes on the pitch can make a difference long after the final whistle is blown, and that’s why I knew that football can be a force for good.

In the summer of 2017, I’d already been working in the field, addressing the refugee crisis for over a year. Those experiences had taken me to France, Greece, Turkey and even the Mediterranean, delivering emergency aid, taking part in search and rescue missions and helping other organisations to develop.

Throughout those months, I’d had the opportunity to take part in the delivery of a number of different football projects: a tournament for displaced people in northern France called The Liberté Cup; activity days for kids in Izmir, Turkey, who had very little else that they could do for fun; and the implementation of football sessions under the name Freedom FC at a community space in northern Greece.

Each time that I was able to merge these two things - my love of football and my work to support displaced people - I could see more and more how beneficial these kinds of projects can be.

When I founded Aniko in the summer of 2017, it was only natural that football would form part of what we would do. We aimed to deliver our football project, Aniko FC, alongside consulting, network-building and emergency response operations, but we quickly realised that we needed to adapt.

Aniko FC was growing exponentially. The demand for our projects was huge, and within our first few months we’d partnered with both the Norwegian Refugee Council and Terre des hommes to deliver sessions for their beneficiaries.

Our Football for All community events, where people come together to share food and, of course, a game, were seeing more than one hundred people attending each month, and we knew we were onto something good.

We decided to pause our other operations, and to focus our energy and resources on making Aniko’s football projects a success.

Now, we’re using football as a tool to tackle some of the biggest issues that displaced people face in new communities.

In Thessaloniki, the Greek city where we currently work, thousands of displaced people who once lived in camps are now in urban accommodation. While this is a great step forward in their process for asylum or status, it also means that the infrastructure and support services that came with living in the camps are no longer available to them.

They’re in communities where they don’t know the people or the language, and it’s normal to become more and more isolated, especially given the terrible things that many have experienced.

By providing football, we’re giving people an opportunity to get out, to get active, and to meet with other people. Our Aniko FC sessions are focused on building confidence and increasing both fitness and positive attitudes, while our Football for All and recently launched Fan Matches events are building bridges with local communities.

We’re just a few weeks into our Fan Matches project, and it’s already been incredible. We’ve partnered with the fan groups of three local football clubs in Thessaloniki, building relationships with the city’s new residents, and attending games together. One event saw 25 people - Greeks, displaced people and volunteers - come together to watch Apollon Pontou. It was especially powerful because we had members of the LGBT+ community, children and women in hijabs, all alongside the local fans, and that’s something we’ve never seen before.

I’m so incredibly proud of the work that we’re doing at Aniko. We’re a small team, but we’re having a big impact, and I know that our projects can change countless lives in the future.

And as it was for me, all those years ago when I moved from Gibraltar to England, so it is for people today who have moved from the Middle East or Africa to Greece: Football has the power to break down boundaries, to make vital connections and to show that we all have something in common.