Country: Brazil

Organization: Vento em Popa

3) Strategy Summary:
To promote ecological awareness and mobilize the riparian communities through the sailboat called Saracura. This boat was developed specially to the project so that it is simple, cheap, easy to build and sail. Each group of 20 teenagers between 14 and 20 years old go through a training period of 6 months. During this time they learn not only how to build the boat and sail, but also how to manage a local action plan. After that, they become social multipliers. By the end of 3 years, we believe that the community will be prepared to lead their development by themselves.

4) How the Strategy Works:
A basic premise of our work is that the youth has a central role in social changes. Beyond the enthusiasm and vitality to take actions, the young people are more opened to confront premises and more receptive to changes. They also influence familiars, educators and leaderships. As they feel and realize that they are part of the solutions and not the problems of the community, they develop competence and abilities they didn t even imagine they could have. We want to use all this potential to personal and social development.

We believe that more independent communities are capable to mobilize, to organize themselves and to act in favor of the common well-being. In this way, they turn their eyes to their own community and assume a pro-active position responding to its demands. To make it possible to develop that process, it is essential to have opportunities and stimulations to think, to do and to communicate.

1st Axle: To DO

The Saracura Project prepares the youth to lead, act, do, and make a difference in their lives and their community. By participating to the building of a home office, the youth start taking it as their own centre for local transformations. Furthermore, interferences on the brick of the dam will turn the area into a pleasant place for their leisure.

The autonomy of a community depends directly on the ability to act on local issues. Besides, we believe that learning by doing is the most effective way of teaching as the knowledge comes from something lived, something known. In addition, it inspires people to have new actions leading to a virtuous cycle of social transformations.

2nd Axle: To Communicate

To show appreciation of the actions and results achieved by the Saracura Project, it is necessary to communicate it. Aiming to reach all houses of the area, the community newspaper enables the teenagers to form a channel of communication that looks into their own community. Easy to understand, it illustrates the local activities and motivates the participation of the public.

The organization works with a group of teenagers qualifying them to write and manage the enterprise. Workshops and meetings take place twice a week. The goal is the autonomy of the group in 3 years. Up to now, 6 publications were produced. The number printed was 5.000 per publication. The newspaper is bimestrial and covers one community at the moment. We are testing different actions around the area so that it can expand to other areas.

3rd Axle: To Think

To open up the mind of the youth involved in the Saracura Project and give opportunities to their curiosities to grow deeper their knowledge, evolving to another stage, another project was developed.

The project designed to this axle is the establishment of community libraries with a large and diverse patrimony accessible to the whole community. The goal is the popularization of reading, essential to personal and human development. At the same time, new abilities arouse and new leaderships that think about the dissemination of information and knowledge are going to stimulate a new way of looking at their own community.

The libraries are environments where people can get to know each other better, discuss what is going on around the area, and think about different actions to solve the problems. In this way, the social network develops as well as the ability to analyze the situations and the pro- activity to take actions.

As a result, more people will be interest in reading the community newspaper, linking the other axle of the tripod. All the books, videos and resources to build the libraries are were donated by individuals or companies.

5) Key Strategy Elements:

ii. Generating Financial and Nonfinancial Resources:
The Saracura boat technology generates different kinds of income to the project: the sale of the instruction manual on how to build the sailboat; the rent of the boat built during the training period; courses on how to build the boat

iii. Establishing Relationships with Strategic Partnerships:
The Saracura Project raises funds with Strategic Partners such as low-income targeted corporations. These companies have their name in the boat as well as in the community newspaper.

iv. Engaging and Managing Volunteers:
Most of the people who work in the organization are students or undergraduate professionals from different majors, mainly business. The volunteer participation means, essentially, an opportunity for these professionals to get in touch with a larger reality. For the NGO it is a way of having more efficient polices.

v. Developing Information and Spreading the Message:
As explained before, there is a community newspaper designed to spread the message and the results of the Saracura Project and the thoughts coming from the community libraries, local associations and committees.

6) Increasing Self-sufficiency and Social Impact:
The idea of the tripod is exactly to make the organization more self sufficient so that we can leave the project by the end of 3 years. As the youth get more knowledge reading, they can make better decisions; make better things happen and communicate it better in the newspaper. As the news are better written and better understood by the community, people want to read it more and discuss and change opinions about it. The more the topics are discussed, with a better background that comes also from reading more, better solutions are found to the local problems. It is a cycle of increasing social impact and self-suficiency.

8) Organization Mission and Vision:
Vision: To strenghen the citizen base so that they have more autonomy to develop. Mission: To look for the best way of educating local multipliers and creating social technology that can be replicated by other riparian communities.

Looking Forward to the Next Three Years:
We hope that in three years the project will be done in one community and started as a model of social technology in many other riparian communities in Brazil and other countries.

Contact Information:
Frederico  Rizzo
Director
Vento em Popa
Rua Nove de setembro, 88
Brazil
Tel: 55 11 5931-8188
Email: frederico@ventoempopa.org.br
Website: www.ventoempopa.org.br