Children walking to Russell M. Conwell Middle Magnet School in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood often negotiate treacherous paths through open-air drug markets, passing dirty, discarded needles and individuals who seem to have died on their feet or lay curled in the street.

But when they reach the school and its new soccer park, green and pristine, a safe place, a place for games, and a game-changer for the community, everything changes. “It gives the neighborhood a sense of hope,” long-time resident and recent Conwell parent Jessica Zeno says of the soccer park, planned by and funded by donations to the Washington, D.C. nonprofit love.fútbol. “You see people respecting the space. It’s bringing back a sense of, let kids be kids.”

Conwell Principal Erica Green calls the soccer park “transformative.” Her school doesn’t have an indoor gym, and since the park opened for play at the start of 2024-25 school year, students have been more physically active and more eager to extend their outdoor time, she says. Student attendance is better. Parent engagement is at a high, which helped the community successfully fight the School District of Philadelphia’s plan to close the school.

On the heels of our World Cup-centered summer, Philadelphians should expect to see a lot more turfed soccer miracles in their neighborhoods, according to love.fútbol organizers and collaborators. Love.fútbol aims to make Philly its first-ever all-city project, with a couple dozen new soccer pitches.

The goal (pardon the pun) is not just about getting local kids to love the world’s most popular and accessible sport. It’s not even about growing U.S. soccer cred in the birthplace of our nation. It’s about capitalizing on and strengthening our city’s strongest unsung asset: our neighborhoods.

For the love of fútbol

Drew Chafetz grew up playing soccer, including at the University of Colorado Boulder. While visiting a small town in Morocco with his family in 2005, Chaftez saw boys who’d converted a narrow alley with a reservoir running through the center into a soccer field. They used rocks as goal posts. The players, none older than 10, nimbly jumped across the ditch and safely navigated the narrow alley.

The takeaway, Chafetz writes on love.fútbol’s website: “Soccer’s greatest strength is its simplicity. You don’t need a perfect pitch for it to serve perfectly.” He and a teammate and friend from Colorado co-founded the nonprofit a year later. (Chafetz now runs the organization; his co-founder moved onto other pursuits.)

For their first project, they raised money from friends and contacts, and headed to the remote Guatemalan village of Villa Nueva, home to 55 families. Building their first pitch taught them a lesson they’d go on to duplicate across the world: ”The community builds the pitch, and the pitch builds the community,” Chafetz says.

”The community builds the pitch, and the pitch builds the community.” — Drew Chaftez, love.fútbol

For their first community build day in Guatemala, 45 heads of household showed up at 6am to help out. When the pitch was finished, a local leader said, “‘This is not just a soccer field; it is lifting the community,’” Chaftez recalls.

Chafetz realized that yes, it was important to build safe play spaces for children to encourage life-long lessons in good health and teamwork, but the real impact was bringing a community together through shared work and a shared ongoing mission. Nineteen years later, that Guatemalan pitch is still integral to town life, where a second generation of players have begun to play.

The organization has since worked with communities around the world, including Brazil, Mexico, India, Spain, and Egypt. Stateside, love.fútbol has launched projects in Miami, Washington, D.C., and Flint, MI. But Philadelphia will be the first U.S. city to have multiple love.fútbol parks and pitches.

Chafetz calls the local effort extending the model “from a micro- neighborhood level to a citywide level.”

Bringing fútbol to Philly

Two things brought love.fútbol to Philly. The first was funding. The organization began working in Philadelphia in 2019 in partnership with the South Jersey-based Pincus Family Foundation and has since received support from Forman Family Fund, among other local sponsors. [The Formans are also supporters of Citizen Media Group, which operates both The Citizen and Philadelphia magazine.]

The second: Having worked all over the globe, partnering with “Amazon, Disney, Pepsico, Adidas, the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations), Manchester City, the Welsh Football Federation, the Mexican Federation,” Chaftez says, “We wanted to work in a place where the people weren’t afraid to work hard and step up for their communities. We sensed Philadelphia had that kind of ethos, and it might be a good place to test what we’d done around the world.”

In Philadelphia, Chafetz says his team immediately “saw a serious level of need” and made a commitment: They would work with underserved neighborhoods to build 26 mini soccer fields. Love.fútbol celebrated the opening of its 11th, at Penrose Elementary School, at the end of July.

Hunting Park’s Alexander K. McClure Elementary School is next in the pipeline. Leah Hood, a coordinator in the School District of Philadelphia’s Department of Office of Strategic Partnerships, says she’s seen the impact these projects have had at other schools, like The Science Leadership Academy at Beeber.

“The school bell rang and the kids got out and went straight to the pitch. They didn’t want to leave school,” Hood marvels. “And that’s a high school, which makes it even more rare that students want to stick around.”

World Cup fever

Again, the timing is ideal. Hosting the 2026 World Cup was an eye-opener for those who thought the beautiful game didn’t appeal to U.S. audiences. A record-breaking 61 million people in the U.S. watched the July 19 final between Spain and Argentina, according to news reports.

The tournament’s buzz went beyond the stadiums and into the streets, especially in host cities. International fans introduced locals to their team songs, traditions and celebratory practices, from the Norwegian Viking row to Mexican fans’ habit of partying outside the rival team’s hotel before a game to disrupt their sleep. These far-and-wide fans seemed to embrace Philadelphia’s easy-to-navigate layout, its history, its neighborhoods, not to mention the nonstop party at the Fan Festival on Lemon Hill and endless ops for selfies on the Art Museum steps.

The Cup strengthened soccer fandom locally for kids like Devyn Smith, 14, who plays striker and, through love.fútbol, was able to attend the Brazil-Haiti World Cup match in South Philly. Before his neighborhood’s soccer park opened, “the concrete was rough and rigid and coming up,” Smith says. “It wasn’t very safe to play outside in the schoolyard or outside in general.”

Smith’s mom, Kayla Ruiz Montanez, says her son is on the pitch often.

“Our kids in this community don’t have a lot of safe spaces where they can play ball, or just hang out together,” she says. What’s also exciting, she says, is how the community keeps an eye on the play space, “keeping it clean and there’s not a lot of riff raff.”

If Philadelphians build it …

Love.fútbol begins its work by finding community members and organizations who are committed to long-term change in their neighborhood and who will stay the course long after the project is completed. As part of that partnership, love.fútbol helps communities find ways to raise money to maintain the fields in the future. That could mean charging adults to use the field or seeking grant funding.

“We didn’t want to view communities as beneficiaries. We really wanted to view them as partners,” Chafetz says.

When love.fútbol planners visited Conwell, Green immediately introduced them to a team of eighth graders who’d already begun designing their ultimate school yard and had renderings to share.

“Having love.fútbol support us made us feel seen. Love.fútbol gave us a platform. Love.fútbol allowed us to show our voice.” — Jessica Zeno, Kensington resident

“Even though the students knew that, if this was to happen, they wouldn’t still be at the school, they were still super excited about the possibility. That’s how it got started,” Green says.

Once a plan for the park was in place, it was time to build. A community build day drew more than 125 people. Chafetz recalls how one mother stood up and announced, “‘We are bringing childhood back to Kensington.’”

The Zenos – Jessica and her son Nico, 13 – were among the volunteers out that day.

“It’s an awesome feeling knowing that this isn’t just for my child. It’s for the next generation to come,” Jessica says. “You want to grab your team and get together and go help the next school.”

One of Nico’s cousins lives and plays soccer in New Jersey, and he and his family were surprised that there wasn’t a place for Nico and his friends to play in Kensington. Jessica remembers that when the park was completed, Nico “was so excited to be able to pick up the phone and call (the Jersey family and say, My school has a soccer field! We took pictures and sent them along.”

The beautiful game comes to Kensington

At the beginning of 2026, the School District included Conwell — which recently celebrated its centennial — on its list of schools to be closed. Conwell alumni citywide pushed back. So did community members who’d worked on the love.fútbol project.

Zeno thinks the community’s efforts — Nico spoke out at a public meeting and was interviewed by the press — and the fact that love.fútbol had chosen to build a beautiful park there contributed to the School District’s decision to keep Conwell open.

“Having love.fútbol support us made us feel seen,” she says. “Love.fútbol gave us a platform. Love.fútbol allowed us to show our voice.”

The park and the school are closely entwined. A partnership with the Kensington Soccer Club means students can get soccer lessons after school and on weekends. Conwell ended the recent school year with a Fun Day at the park, a way to celebrate a successful year — and to keep students coming to class until the last day.

“We’re going to be here for another 100 years,” Green says confidently. “Conwell’s soccer park is more than just a [soccer] pitch — it is a true community achievement. This is a sacred space … and it’s all because of love.fútbol.”

And South Philly

In late July, representatives from the School District and love.fútbol joined students and parents of Penrose Elementary School, along with more representatives of the Philadelphia Union and the Wrexham AFC Foundation (repping the North Wales, UK soccer club owned by actors Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds) to celebrate Penrose’s new soccer park.

In addition to the mini-pitch, the school yard renovations include a basketball court, seating and plantings, and a student-designed mural painted by a Penrose parent. Community members had been involved in every step of development, from sharing ideas about what play elements would best suit their children to swinging hammers to construct the benches.

Carol Casciato, principal of the 400-student K-8 school, buzzed through the crowd, beaming. Earlier, she’d told a friend that on days when things inside the building get challenging, she’ll walk outside to remind herself what’s possible when a community comes together.

“Penrose has a large campus but we did not have a safe place for play,” Casicato says. “All year, the students were asking, Mrs. Casciato, when is it coming? When is it coming? Our students are going to come back to school and see this beautiful field.”

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