Reaching out to street children in Brazil.
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When
a man is willing and passionate, the gods are with him.
Aeschylus,
Greek dramatist (525-426 B.C.)
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The
crisis of the state and the limits of the free market have fuelled a boom in voluntary
work, in which business is taking a lead
"Do your bit” is the
slogan of a major radio campaign by the Brazilian Organizing Committee for the International
Year of Volunteers 2001. The simple and blunt slogan is emblematic of a trend that
has been changing Brazilian society in recent years–the boom in voluntary work.
A nationwide survey in 1998 by the Institute for Studies in Religion (ISER) in Rio
de Janeiro showed that 22.6 percent of Brazil’s adult population–or 13.9 million
people–did some kind of unpaid social work, and that 13.9 percent of them belonged
to a community association. These figures are far behind the 49 percent of U.S. citizens
who do voluntary work, but they reflect a remarkable development in Brazilian society,
which has traditionally been polarized between the state and the private sector,
with little room in between for community involvement.
“The growth of voluntary activity is largely because our institutions are going through
a serious crisis,” says the president of the São Paulo city council, José
Eduardo Cardozo, who was elected last year with strong support from civic awareness
groups.
Leilah Landim, a researcher from ISER, argues that the growing number of volunteers
in Brazil is changing the nature of social work, which for the first three centuries
of European colonization was the almost exclusive domain of the Catholic Church.
Social
networks instead of crime
But
the triumph of free-market economics, the decline of trade unions, the state’s faltering
ability to invest and the dizzying growth of problems such as urban violence, drug
trafficking, AIDS and teenage pregnancies, have paved the way for the construction
of new social networks based on voluntary work and goodwill initiatives by business.
“Millions of people, many of them wealthy, have realized that poverty can lead to
drug dealing that could threaten their own children,” says Gilson Schwartz, of the
University of São Paulo’s Institute of Advanced Studies. “Many business people
now understand that supporting professional training programmes is the way to get
children off the street, where they might otherwise fall into a life of crime that
could threaten their businesses.”
One of the features of this boom in voluntary work in Brazil is the attempt to go
beyond simple handouts. Ruth Cardoso, the anthropologist wife of President Fernando
Henrique Cardoso, is the driving force behind the Community Solidarity Programme.
She launched the Volunteers’ Project at the end of 1997 with the stated aim of improving
on traditional populist schemes. The project’s charter declares that it is urgent
to “establish a modern culture of voluntary work based on trained volunteers and
making services work.”
Bankers
on the literacy trail
The
charter also says, with a touch of irony, that “the new vision of voluntary work
has nothing to do with charity or providing bored people with things to do.”
In the last five years, voluntary work has enabled Community Solidarity to give vocational
training to 87,000 young people between 16 and 21 reckoned to be “at risk of social
exclusion.”
But perhaps the most original feature of this growth in voluntary work is occurring
inside companies. A recent survey among 100 of the 380 firms affiliated to the Ethos
Institute, which promotes business ethics, showed that 94 percent of them had their
own voluntary projects.
The state-owned Bank of Brazil’s “Read, Write and Liberate” programme, for example,
involves more than 2,100 of its employees in voluntary efforts to promote literacy
and encourage people all over the country to read. The programme has already taught
more than 31,000 people to read and write, and one of its most recent successes was
to teach these skills to 220 inhabitants of a small Amazonian village, Belém
do Alto Solimões.
Meanwhile, the Dutch multinational clothing firm C & A says 20 percent of its
Brazilian employees–equivalent to 1,400 people–are doing voluntary work. The cosmetics
group Natura has assembled a group of storytellers who go around the country entertaining
thousands of people in schools, hospitals and other social institutions. Through
the “Children Are Life” programme, 84 volunteers from the Schering-Plough laboratory
have taught basic principles of health and hygiene to more than 25,000 children since
1998.
Non-toxic
glue
At
the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing plant at Sumaré, about 120 kilometres
from São Paulo, 80 percent of the 2,600 employees take part in voluntary work.
Staff from the Brazilian subsidiary of the U.S. security firm Chubb set aside one
day a year to teach children from poor areas about what they do. The 95 branches
of the local subsidiary of the U.S. shoe firm Heel Sew Quick (HSQ) are helping to
fund a school for young shoemakers in São Paulo, and have also developed a
non-toxic glue that will be used by HSQ in all its overseas factories. Shoemakers’
glue is widely used as a drug by street children in Brazil’s major cities.
“The social awareness of Brazilians has clearly grown,” says Dr Walmir Frare, who
runs Bit Company, one of the country’s biggest networks of computer training schools.
“The idea that private firms should help to reduce social inequalities has really
caught on, and a big part of that is supporting voluntary work by their employees.”
Bit Company is involved in training teachers and students, and has an experimental
project to teach elderly people how to use computers.
Many voluntary programmes start out as fairly personal or informal schemes. Human
resources expert Gilmar Bernardi, who works for the French telecommunications giant
Alcatel in São Paulo, decided 10 years ago to fund the creation of a nursery
for working mothers in a church on the edge of the city. Today there are three, one
of them in a favela, or slum area.
Powerful
alliances
While
social work spreads throughout Brazilian civil society, it must still be stressed
that religious organizations continue to play a major part in voluntary action, particularly
among the very poor.
Lastly, the rapid expansion of the Internet in Brazil is giving a powerful boost
to voluntary activity. At first, charities found it an excellent way to raise money
and disseminate their ideas. Nowadays, its main contribution to voluntary social
work is perhaps through education. Many projects use it to enable students and teachers
to help deprived students throughout the country.
Perhaps the most ambitious programme is the City of Knowledge, run by São
Paulo University’s Institute for Advanced Studies and the Education Faculty Foundation,
backed by the media (the newspapers Gazeta Mercantil, Folha de São Paulo and
O Estado de São Paulo), big companies such as IBM, Banco Santander and Boston
Bank, and the publishing houses Moderna and Pangea. The project involves permanent
voluntary in-firm training of instructors, teachers and students.
Volunteers
Portal (www.portaldovoluntario.org.br) describes examples
of social work and suggests ways businesses can get involved. The site has had more
than a million and a half visitors in its first four months online. |
