Abu Dhabi: A community based group in Abu Dhabi has made the act of charity both fun and healthy thanks to its initiative of combining sports with charitable causes.
Hoops Basketball, founded in 2015 by members of the Filipino expatriate community, helps to raise funds by organising basketball tournaments throughout the year, with the proceeds going towards humanitarian causes in the Philippines, most notably helping those who have been affected by typhoons.
“Many Filipinos living in Abu Dhabi are basketball fans, and it was a regular practice for friends to get together on the weekends to play. So we decided to channel this enthusiasm towards charitable causes for our home country,” said Angelo Salarza, one of the co-founding members of Hoops Basketball.
The transition to making the sport work for charity began with renting indoor basketball courts. “In our first year, we managed to hold four tournaments, with the fifth one currently under way,” said Salarza. “Players register to participate in the tournament with a Dh50 fee. After all the costs are paid for, the money that remains is donated to a charitable cause,” he added.
The group raised more than Dh10,000 in 2015, and Salarza hopes this year, they will be able to generate more.
“We managed a good number of tournaments in our first year alone, so there is a lot of interest in what we are doing. With time, we are definitely going to grow,” said Salarza.
Regarding the size of participation, Salarza said, “Our tournaments draw about 16 to 25 teams, depending on the format and it’s great to see this because it has been achieved in such a short period of time.”
An important aspect of charity is to be able to correctly identify the problems that need immediate attention. “This makes the charity work more effective,” said Salaraza.
“Many of our families have been affected by typhoons [back in the Philippines], so at one time or another, we have all known what it is like to be affected by such things,” he said.
The scale of effort required to rebuild areas devastated by typhoons, he said, is thus big and this makes charity assume even greater urgency and importance “to get normalcy back into peoples lives”.
