O Grito

According to our strategic planning, we will use the funding to increase the number of people supported, we will increase the impact through 4 fronts: culture and sports, professional technical courses, citinzenship and sustainability. Today we impact 10,000 people and with the funding we will impact 36,000 people. Some examples of our projects:  we offer music therapy workshops, soccer, skateboarding, theater, programming courses, professional techical courses for vulnerable children and teenagers. The headquarter of O Grito is a safe place in the middle of one of the biggest favelas of the state. It is a nice house where all people are welcome, have access to high end computers and coaches. O Grito created an Advisory Board who has important leaders of Brazil as members. One of my strenghts is to mobilize people and use the networks to leverage the impact. We also created a social business during the pandemic, which is the manufacturing of industrial uniforms to generate jobs and income for adults in the community. The funding will be used to leverage this business. The goal of O Grito is to be a reference in offering professional development for the young people in the favelas in Brazil.

I am married, father of two daughters, 37 years old. I was born in a simple home in the north of Minas Gerais. My parents used to move from places to places seeking for better living and working conditions on coffee farms in the south of the state. However, conditions only got worse, which made us migrate to Belo Horizonte. In the capital of Minas Gerais, my family rented a shed with only a bunk bed, a stove and a wooden bench. It was during this period that I had my first contact with the school and my first school supplies were given by the owner of the shed, rented by the family. My father worked as a bricklayer servant, but he drank a lot and the addiction brought great damage to the family, such as domestic violence. I made a choice, instead of regretting or revolting, I started for the first time to undertake, using the skill and gift I have in the area of art, to sell drawings at the school I studied, and used the money at the time to buy the special food that the mother needed, due to the illness she had. In 1997, we moved again, this time to Ribeirão das Neves. We lived in an occupation, no structure, we received donations of food and little by little, with many fights and battles the family lived one day at a time. In 2011 I started working at a large construction company and was delighted with the projects. I enrolled in a technical drawing school and started to study. My drawing skills made me stand out and a was invited by teacher to be an intern there. In 2013 I became a missionary and developed a work called Impacto. The actions were aimed at children from the peripheries. Unhappy with the lack of structure in my community, I decided to create the "O GRITO" (the scream) of hope, peace, freedom, joy, justice and then, together with friends, founded the O Grito Institute in order to offer a new perspective on life for everyone who suffers from social vulnerability. Maybe I won't be able to end the world's pain. But I will do everything to reduce it. My vision is to send the favela to the museum. We want to become a big socio-cultural center to promote sustainability, entrepreneurship and social responsibility. 

The specific problem I am currently solving is combating hunger in the pandemic, taking care of education (through adult literacy, english classes, entrepreneurial training courses, programming), preparing people for jobs and migrating all offers to online format. It is important to mention that education is not valued by the parents of the children of the favela, for example. The people at O Grito need to take care of the children's education and the parents' awareness to allow the project to happen. Parents need to be taught to see value in education. We also work to reduce the digital gap. Through digital inclusion, we offer training for people to have an equal condition to operate in the work environment, which today is strongly digital. Today in Brazil we have 7,000 favelas and 14 million people living in inhuman conditions. The pandemic has further increased the number of people in situations of vulnerability and in need of any and all support. O Grito is the first instance of support that people from the 9 communities served seek. There are at least 40,000 people in the communities currently served by O Grito. There is a huge lack of public policies and all sort of services and support to the favela by the government. 

Innovation is in our DNA. We seek to bring new technologies to the favela and reveal talents and new businesses. We seek to work on emotional intelligence and technical skills in vulnerable young people so that they are prepared to enter or return to the job market. O Grito is connected with networks of development and acceleration of favelas as well as with the corporate and academic world. Through these partnerships, the "O Grito" team participates in training programs frequently and takes care of self-development to ensure the updating and longevity of the institution. O Grito works with a management system with strategy, deployed into goals and indicators that are monitored weekly.

We plan to have favelas at the museum. It sould become part of the past. The steps we are making are, as we showed before, to support people in favela, from early age until adults so, through our iniciatives they can have access to education, activities such as music, arts, language, computer programming and also provide emotional intelligence development for them to be prepared to feel they are citizens. It doesn´t matter where you come from, it matters where you want to go. Plus, we offer professional technical training so people (teenagers and adult) can go back to the job market. More recently we created the Griffte, that is a social impact business where we produce professional uniforms to be sold to industries that operate in the city. All the employees of this social impact business are from the favela and the profit made by the sales of the uniforms is reinvested in the O GRITO.