Jill Pardini was a Johns Hopkins graduate student when she took an interest in Baltimore’s refugee population. On a lark, the former soccer player did her research and decided to bring them a program centered around her sport.

She passed out fliers and waivers and set up a time for interested kids and parents to turn out.

“I really thought I would show up for 15 minutes and no one would come, you tried! Then I would go and enjoy my summer in the city,” Pardini recalled.

What she got were more than 60 kids from 4 to 24 and what began as a part-time effort turned, with the help of grant money, into a full-time job with five paid staffers and volunteers.

Five years on, the Baltimore chapter of the international group Soccer Without Borders serves just shy of 70 middle and high school students. (Pardini said affiliating with the eight-year-old Oakland-based non-profit was easier than forming her own organization from the ground up.)

Baltimore, believe it or not, is one of the foremost resettlement destinations for America’s refugees and asylees, with residents hailing from far-flung nations such as Iraq, Nepal, Congos and Bhutan.

Soccer Without Borders targets under-served youth, typically emigres, in cities including Chicago, New York and Los Angeles and internationally in Kampala, Uganda and Granada, Nicaragua.

On May 29, the Baltimore chapter hosts an anniversary fundraiser gala at Cylburn Arboretum. Chief among the group’s fundraising needs, Pardini said, are transportation and space to accommodate the growing program and its future needs.

This is Home

It’s a rainy early May afternoon at Northeast Middle School, as about 40 middle-school participants study inside and the two dozen who are high school aged scrimmage on the dampened pitch that has pretty obviously seen better days. There are gnarly tufts of grass and well-worn, muddy splotches, marks of many a soccer practice gone by.

“This is home,” Pardini said. “I picked this field because families are placed in these neighborhoods” near the school.

Except in particularly nasty weather (when they retreat to the school gym), you’ll find Pardini’s kids out on the field at Northeast. Some of the older participants come from as far away as Digital Harbor High School, she said. In the course of the scrimmages or games — typically against private schools — the students learn English, and in some cases, students who didn’t know soccer learn that, too.

“I’ve learned a lot. Now I feel like I can play against anybody,” said Congolese native Daniel Echa, 16. “When I came here I didn’t speak English, but now I do speak English. So it’s like communication on the field, a lot of this friendly stuff.”

Though a number of SWB Baltimore players hail from Africa, Patterson High student Manuel Gonzalez came to America from El Salvador in the spring of 2012 and joined Pardini’s team that fall.

“It’s why I know English now, because when I started to play, I didn’t really speak English at all,” he said. “But [playing] with them, being the only Spanish speaker, it helped me [learn English] because I had to talk to them.”

More than ever, students now come to improve their English, as much as to play ball.

“It very much snowballed into getting to intimately know the families and getting invited for coffee and chatting with them and they would just hand me bills or say ‘I have this problem,’” Pardini said. “The more I found out, the more I realized there could and should be a lot more going on.”

Some of that entered SWB in 2011, after Pardini was named a Baltimore Community Fellow by the Open Society Institute-Baltimore. The associated funds allowed her to put “everything else. . .on pause” in her life and turn SWB from a one-woman show to something much more. She also added the academic component. Middle schoolers spend time with volunteer tutors doing homework or learning English. High schoolers are prepared for college work.

Kate McGrain, the Baltimore chapter’s volunteer coordinator, said all of the program’s record eight graduating seniors are going on to college, with two attending four-year institutions. Some have been in the United States for a matter of months. Some, years.

Yet despite those successes, Pardini said she seldom spends time on introspection.

“I’m one of those types of people that doesn’t really look back at where we came from, because I feel like there’s so much to do,” she said. “But I will say there’s definitely times, particularly when you’re in a space where there’s so many others involved, there’s times when I’ll catch myself [thinking] ‘When this first started, it was a handful of soccer balls and I had a bicycle.’”