From Harvard to Cape Town and back: Birth of a nonprofit

On a July morning four boys, all members of the Bromfield varsity soccer team, and their adviser Epiphany Vera stepped from their car onto the grassy fields of the Royal Road sports complex in Cape Town. It was a cold morning, sunny and clear, winter in South Africa. The boys were dressed in sweatpants and hoodies. A perfect day for soccer and the start of a weeklong holiday camp for children living in an at-risk area of Cape Town.

The far side of the field was bounded by stacks of shipping containers, recalled Liam Morrison, one of the trip’s student organizers. To the right was a neighborhood of modest houses, while behind him loomed the flat expanse of Table Mountain, the geographic feature that dominates the skyline of South Africa’s southernmost city.

Waiting for them was the lone figure of Jeremy Wyngaard, director of LifeZone Sports, a nonprofit he founded in 2006 to bring hope to the lives of children living in high-risk communities of the Western Cape. A former professional soccer player for Hellenic and Santos in Cape Town, Wyngaard is also director of the Moravian Theological Centre of the Moravian Church of South Africa and a research associate and part-time lecturer at Stellenbosch University, where he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy.

Board members visit the LifeZone Soccer facility in Cape Town. From left: Jeremy Wyngaard, founder of LifeZone, Jack Babcock, Liam Morrison, Colin Martel, and Tafara Vera.(Courtesy photo)

Morrison was stressed. The group had a plan they had worked out with Wyngaard in monthly Zoom calls, but some details had been left unresolved. The boys would collaborate with LifeZone coaches to run a four-day holiday camp. The dates had been chosen to coincide with the winter break of South Africa’s schools. The boys would provide money to pay for food, transportation, and wages for local coaches. Wyngaard would recruit the coaches from among his LifeZone staff. Together they would offer the program to children in Factreton and Kensington, many of whom attended Wingfield Primary School where LifeZone is based. The Bromfield boys would be paired with the LifeZone coaches, The routines and drills, the specifics of the daily program, had yet to be worked out.

It was a little after 8:30 a.m. as Morrison, his teammates, and Wyngaard greeted one another. Time to set up the field. Soon the coaches and children would arrive.

A wish to ‘give back’

For Morrison and his companions, seniors Jack Babcock, Colin Martel, and Tafara Vera, this July morning was the culmination of a plan that had emerged the previous year from an entirely different undertaking. In the spring of 2021, a group of 10 senior Bromfield soccer players had begun raising money for a trip to England the following August where they planned to attend a U.K. soccer camp and a Premier League Manchester United match. The trip would celebrate a decade of playing together, beginning with an indoor soccer team they had formed in first grade and continuing through their years as members of the Bromfield varsity team.

The group was advised by Epiphany Vera, Tafara’s father, a nationally recognized leader of Harvard’s youth soccer program. As the boys began to fundraise to help defray the cost of air travel and the camp, he suggested they contribute some portion to charity. “We can’t just think of ourselves. If you’re able to raise this money, think of other people,” he told them.  The notion of “giving back” appealed to the group, and they agreed to set aside 10% of the  money they raised to an organization yet to be determined.

The boys contracted with a Worcester company, Apex Logistics, to clean Fedex trucks, earning between $150 and $200 per truck, working four-to-six-hour shifts or longer, according to Theo Bradley, another member of the team. The group also sold 50-50 raffle tickets to augment their truck-cleaning earnings.

When it became clear the boys would have enough to make a substantial donation, Tafara Vera suggested they consider African Brothers Football Academy of Cape Town, which before the pandemic had sponsored soccer activities to bridge the cultural divide between underprivileged and more affluent suburbs of Cape Town. Tafara Vera, who has family in South Africa, had been to Cape Town several times while growing up and in 2019 had trained with the  Brothers while on a family vacation. But further inquiries revealed that African Brothers was no longer in business.

“At that point, I was ready to say, ‘OK, let’s look for something local,’ ” Epiphany Vera recalled. He would have been fine if they had found a local organization, he said. But once they had the idea of donating to a soccer organization in South Africa, “they didn’t want to let go of it.”

Tafara Vera asked a brother of his father, one of three who live in Cape Town, to recommend another organization. The brother suggested LifeZone Sports. Epiphany Vera spoke with Wyngaard and agreed his organization would be a good choice. Morrison and Tafara Vera were designated by their teammates to follow up.

The players had planned to offer a cash donation to support a holiday day camp like the ones LifeZone had run in previous years, but they quickly learned LiveZone had  none in the works. “We had COVID for three years so we couldn’t do the camps,” Wyngaard told the Press.

What if the Bromfield boys worked with LifeZone to organize a camp and then journeyed to Cape Town to run it, Morrison and Tafara Vera asked. Wyngaard liked the idea, and soon he and the two boys were chatting monthly, figuring out how to staff and provide food and transportation for a five-day camp in the summer of 2022. By the spring, the boys realized they had raised enough money to donate $3,500 to the project, twice the amount planned. Four boys accompanied by Tafara’s father would travel to Cape Town. The boys would pay for their plane tickets, food, and lodging so their donation could be spent entirely on the camp.

Cape Town, Day 1

And so July 4, as residents gathered back home for the annual Harvard Fourth of July parade, Morrison, Jack Babcock, Colin Martel, and Tafara Vera found themselves on a field in Cape Town, ready for the first day of Camp Cape Town, the name they had given their venture. Epiphany Vera remembers that on the short drive from the Airbnb in which the boys were staying to Royal Road, their biggest concern was whether the kids would listen to them. “While we’re driving, Babcock says, you know, we should probably just tell them that we are all 18—they might respect us more.”

Tour guide Wandile tells the history of Langa Township, South Africa, to Harvard soccer players Colin Martel (partially visible) and Liam Morrison. (Courtesy photo)

On their arrival, Wyngaard laid out the plan for the day. When the children arrived, they would be divided into four groups, three groups of boys, sorted by age, and one group of girls. Each Harvard player would be assigned to one and paired with a LifeZone coach. In planning the camp, the four boys had budgeted for 50 kids, figuring they could be divided into groups of 12 or 13.

One by one the four coaches appeared: Chad, Kian, Tristan, and Louise. All four were in their early 20s and had worked as staff or volunteers with Wyngaard at Wingfield Primary School in Factreton where LifeZone is based. “We talked with them, were matched up, and we agreed we were going to be more like a co-coaches rather than head or assistant coach,” recalls Morrison.

The children began to arrive around 9 a.m. Most attended Wingfield and lived in either Kensington and Factreton, underprivileged areas struggling to shed the legacy of apartheid, the policy of racial separation that in the 1950s forced the Black, Indian, and mixed-race or colored populations of Cape Town to move away from the city into designated townships.

A number of children came from one of the poorest areas of Factreton, an area of unauthorized housing known as an “informal settlement,” shacks of wood and metal built on empty and less desirable plots by displaced families, and poorly served by either municipal sanitation or water. 

As the boys were getting acquainted with their coaching partners, Wyngaard asked Epiphany Vera to help pick up some children from the informal settlement. He remembers thinking the kids knew Wyngaard was coming. “I followed him in my car, and when he parked and got out you could just see kids running after him—‘Coach  Jeremy, Coach Jeremy’—because they knew him from school.” Both cars were quickly filled.

By the time the training sessions were about to begin, as many as 60 or 70 children, including those transported from the settlement, had shown up. There had been no formal registration. Epiphany Vera recalled that the word had been put out to Wingfield students that there was going to be a camp and anyone interested could “just show up.” LifeZone typically works with 12- to 14-year-olds, but word of the camp drew children whose ages ranged from under 10 to 16. One girl, Maya, was only 8 years old, and after asking Morrison if it was OK that she’d never played soccer, she followed him the entire week.

Chaos

The camp got underway around 9 a.m. Wyngaard introduced the Bromfield boys and explained the program. Every child got a piece of fruit—a banana or clementine—for breakfast. “It was pretty chaotic,” recalled Morrison. “It was pretty nerve wracking,” agreed Tafara Vera. “The four of us were not experienced in organizing big events.”

Morrison was assigned to the youngest group and paired with Chad, who knew the children well; many were part of a team he coached at Wingfield. They split the group in half and Morrison was on his own. “There was a lot of improvisation,” he recalled. “I had drills in mind,” but watching the kids he could see that some were too complicated and he adjusted them accordingly. While there was a lot of pressure and stress that first day, he recalled, the day was also fun because at last they were living their dream. “This is it,” thought Morrison. “This is what it all came down to.”

The drills and a final scrimmage for each group ended around 1 p.m. The children were given lunch and released, some driven, others walking home. “It was kind of what you’d expect in a camp lunch,” said Babcock. “A hot dog or a sandwich, a bag of chips, a little juice and then pieces of fruit.”

On the following three days, the number of children continued to increase, rising to 100 or 120, twice the number the boys had budgeted. Sixteen-seater minibus taxis known as “kombies” were hired to pick up and return children to their neighborhoods. Each day, Wyngaard had the boys switch to a different group and work with a different LifeZone coach. Tafara Vera said they learned the value of giving the youngest campers breaks, “not just for giving them a rest but to maintain their attention.” Breaks helped with the larger groups to keep everybody focused, he said. And if a drill proved too complex or the group’s attention wandered, letting the children scrimmage was a dependable solution.

Wyngaard said that at first the boys appeared uncomfortable in their roles as group leaders, “but on the second or third day, they were into the swing of things.” Epiphany Vera said he was surprised at how much the LifeZone and Bromfield coaches seemed to learn from each other. He said he would have expected that the Bromfield boys would have had much to learn from their Cape Town peers. “But it was a two-way process,” he said. In South Africa, there is a focus on building technical skills, such as kicking, tackling, or dribbling, he said, while in the States there is greater emphasis on making soccer fun, especially for younger players. The goal is to have fun, but learn skills in the process, an approach the boys were able to incorporate into their drills and games.

A celebration in Cape Town

On the final day of the camp, a Friday, the boys rented a bus and transported approximately 100 kids to Eco Green Park in central Cape Town, not far from the stadium that hosted the 2010 World Cup games. There they picnicked, scrimmaged, and held a final ceremony. Few of the children had ever been out of their township. The park featured a large pond, and the youngest children were entranced by its small fish, Morrison recalled. “My job was to keep them from going in the water,” he said.

During lunch in a small amphitheater, each camp participant was called by name to receive a certificate, with a round of applause from their peers and fist bumps from Wyngaard and the coaches. “We wanted to give them some kind of validation and recognition,” said Morrison, who designed and printed the certificates. On the certificates were the LifeZone logo, a Camp Cape Town logo, and LifeZone’s mantra: “Anything is possible. Dream possible.”

During the outing and on their return ride to the suburbs, “the kids kept asking, ‘Are you guys coming back; are you going to do this again?’ ” Epiphany Vera told the Press. “I think that’s when [the boys] began asking, ‘How can we get this done again next year?’ ”

A chance encounter

With a few days left before returning to the States, Epiphany Vera wanted the boys to see another part of Cape Town, Langa, the first all-Black township created by the apartheid government in the 1940s and still one of the poorest in South Africa. Langa was also the birthplace of some of the first protests against the hated pass laws that confined nonwhite populations to townships outside the all-white Cape.

While on the tour, the boys encountered children playing soccer on a poorly drained street. It had rained the day before and there was standing water everywhere. One thing led to another, and after joining the children for a time in informal “street soccer,” Epiphany Vera and the Bromfield boys were introduced to Nathia Gigada, a local activist and coach of a Langa youth soccer team. The chance encounter led to a spur-of-the-moment offer to host a two-day camp for his players.

That night the boys devised a program and purchased 10 soccer balls and a set of cones to leave behind. The following day, they joined Gigada and his players outside Langa to walk 10 minutes to the team’s practice field, an ugly patch of green between the north-south lanes of a major highway, the M7, a field dotted with anthills that lacked lines or goal posts.

“It was very spontaneous,” said Babcock. “We were like, hey, we’ve got two extra days. We needed something to do and it’s either [soccer] or some tourism. What’s better than really experiencing the country and getting to know people and helping others?”

Added Morrison, “We gave the coach a bunch of new drills that he hadn’t done before. We were much more organized than we had been with LifeZone.” Luckily, the boys also had a box of 50 Camp Cape Town jerseys on hand, too few to distribute to the more than 100 LifeZone participants, but plenty for the Langa players, who were dressed in hand-me-downs. The children were less fluent in English; most spoke Xhosa. But Babcock and the others judged the camp to be the high point of the trip. “When you’re literally playing in between two highways, you’re experiencing just simply the joy of soccer,” he said.

The birth of a nonprofit

In August, after their return to the states, Morrison, Babcock, Tafara Vera, and Martel joined the six other Bromfield senior varsity players for their long-planned trip to England. Inevitably, at night, in the U.K. camp dorm, talk turned to the success of the Cape Town partnerships and the group’s wish to repeat the experience in the summer of 2023. What would be the proper means for not only extending the group’s relationship with LifeZone but also making the experience open to other students at Bromfield?

Campers pose for a photo. (Courtesy photo)

And by late December the boys had their answer. With help from Bart Morrison, Liam’s father, and Epiphany Vera, the group decided to create a 501(c)(3), to be named Youth Development Partnerships, whose mission  would be “to provide assistance in athletics to young individuals locally and internationally, especially in impoverished communities.” (See "Youth Development Partnerships below.) Shortly before Christmas, the boys received word from the IRS that their application was complete and had been accepted.

“For me, the big thing is passing forward opportunities,” Tafara Vera reflected this week. The boys had modeled Cape Town soccer camp after the camps they’d experienced growing up, and he had attended many of them, “But I never really thought twice about it; it was just something I did,” he said. It was an experience that was unavailable to many kids in Cape Town either because they can’t afford it or because it’s just not offered. “I think it’s a good idea to get people to realize what we have and what they don’t have, and that they should want to give that opportunity to other people.”

Wyngaard said Camp Cape Town couldn’t have come at a better time for LifeZone. “We wouldn’t have had the camp if the Bromfield boys hadn’t come forward.” They were teachable, down-to-earth, willing to learn, “not snobbish,” he said. 

In the space of just five days, the boys made a lasting impression on both the children and coaches who participated, he said. “We want to say thanks so much—please make a note of that.”