FC Barcelona’s tour of the United States was an excellent opportunity to promote the club around the world. Of particular importance were the agreements signed with the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation and the Fundación Pies Descalzos.
The agreements signed with internationally prestigious organisations has done wonders for FC
Barcelona’s international image, but even more for the beneficiaries, who are children around
the world in vulnerable situations. In Miami, the FC Barcelona Foundation signed an
agreement with the Fundación Pies Descalzos
founded by Shakira and which works with disadvantaged children in Colombia and the United
States.
Projecting values to children
The vice president of the FC Barcelona Social Area, Jordi
Cardoner, said his fondest memory of his days in the USA is “being with children because it
is a world of excitement … It is a world we work with a lot. We basically want to project
values to them, for them to be the ones that make use of this tool, sport and football.
Agreement with Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation
In Washington, FC Barcelona presented a collaboration
agreement with the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation
to eradicate poliomyelitis in an event that had major media repercussions. The director and
vice president of the FC Barcelona Foundation, Ramon Pont, who played a big role in the event, said
that “being with Bill Gates’ Foundation is priceless”. He repeated the words of
the cofounder of Microsoft, who said “we share the same values as FC Barcelona” and
added that “for a club to have a foundation is unusual”.
Consolidating the Club’s social commitments
As well as these two agreements, the Club also visited two of
its supporters clubs in Miami and Washington, reinforced its commitments to Unicef in an event in
Dallas, met the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and visited the FC Barcelona campus in Miami.
Cardoner knows that the club’s amazing successes on the pitch have a lot to do with the
increased support in America, and said that “from the Social Area we want to strengthen and
consolidate our growth and ensure that when the results are not so good, that this support will not
change.”