A place to play for newcomers to the city
Ubuntu Athletic Centre will open in April as part of local non-profit Empowerment Squared’s recently built, 20,000-square-foot facility on Arrowsmith Road, which also includes classrooms
A local non-profit is adding a shiny athletic facility to its growing fleet of resources that help young newcomers and their families settle in Hamilton.
Dubbed the Ubuntu Athletic Centre — a name that plays off the Zulu term “humanity” — the spacey gym replete with basketball nets, equipment and a built-in sound system will open in April at Empowerment Squared’s new, 20,000-square-foot facility on Arrowsmith Road in east Hamilton.
It will offer hundreds of young newcomers easily accessible, organized sports and recreational programming, a key way for marginalized youth to integrate into unfamiliar environments.
“Sports is really the only means for newcomer youth to avoid social isolation and social inclusion, and it’s the most powerful tool of social inclusion,” said Leo Johnson, executive director of Empowerment Squared.
“They don’t need to be fluent in English to play sports; they don’t need to be good at academics. It breaks down all barriers immediately.”
The 5,000-square-foot gym is just the latest addition to Empowerment Squared’s sprawling, east-end expansion facility, which they acquired in partnership with the Children’s Aid Society during COVID-19.
The multipurpose centre took about $1 million in donations to renovate and construct, said Johnson. Beyond the centrepiece gym, it boasts a host of services geared toward newcomer youth, like a kitchen, several classrooms and up to 30 computer workstations.
Empowerment Squared began around 2007 — its flagship location is downtown on King William Street — with a goal of giving marginalized and newcomer youth the tools and knowledge to succeed in unfamiliar environments.
Johnson said the reason for opening a new multipurpose facility in east Hamilton was twofold.
On one hand, it afforded them the space to build an athletic facility — in past years the charity’s sports programming largely relied on booking availability of community gyms, which isn’t always a guaranteed bet. On the other, it made them more accessible to newcomer families living in one of Hamilton’s lowest-income areas.
“It was very, very intentional to put a facility there,” Johnson said of the centre on Arrowsmith. “A lot of youth walk or take the bus, and sometimes we were seeing kids coming as far as Oriole Crescent (west of Eastgate Square) to our downtown location. “A lot of the services in this city are very congested within the downtown, so part of our thinking was to (identify) communities like this one where the need is astronomical.”
‘‘ They don’t need to be fluent in English to play sports; they don’t need to be good at academics.
LEO JOHNSON EMPOWERMENT SQUARED