NGOs (as submitted to Planetary Magazine)

Submitted by Luciana Pimentel on Friday, November 12, 2004 at 05:26:31 AM EST.

In Brazil there are many NGO’s. They help our society when the government can’t help.
Iko Poran offers strong programs which promote a positive impact on the communities. All of them have very well defined objectives, activities, impact evaluation and performance evaluation.
The programs also offer the opportunity for a rich cultural exchange, training volunteers in the communities, generating income and employment while sharing the revenues with the partner organizations under transparency and ethics.
Our group thinks that this kind of program must be respected. People should visit it to play with the children and teach them that they have to go to school to learn new things and later get their own degree ( go to a university). This kind of program, where you participate to help people, teaches you lots of things, like: You meet and know better the life of each child.
We know that many street children prefer to join the drug dealing business to make money, but now with this NGO, where they learn music and dance, they will be interested in these things. So they will learn how to respect rules and limits, and that’s important to build a better world.
OndAzul (Blue Wave) foundation was founded in 1990. It was Gilberto Gil’s idea, one of the most expressive and well-known artists, who is also an environmental activist and minister of culture (Brazil) in the Lula Administration. The main objective is the creation of job opportunities, the generation of income and recycling of plastic bottles to be used in the production of furniture frames. The Vigário Geral community was identified as an ideal space to serve as a model for this development project, which associates the social subject to environmental issues. The organization has many successful projects like: Praia Linda- Praia Limpa (Beautiful beach- clean beach) and Não deixe o Mar morrer na Praia (Don´t let the ocean die at the beach). There are a lot of social and ecological ideas in the program and that is the objective of the foundation.
We think that this is very important to help poor children. All these programs work to promote positive aspects on the communities and they want to build a bridge that connects black people and white people or poor and rich. OndAzul is an NGO that was created by Gilberto Gil and its objective is the recycling of plastic and other things. The music is a way to motivate and to teach the children. These kinds of social programs offer an artistic education with volunteer work. Our group (Luiza Neves, Nathália Paiva, Nathália Oliveira and Maria Pia), go to a hospital every first Tuesday of the month to do volunteer work with poor children at Hospital da Lagoa. We love going there and playing with the children!! We think that everybody should try this kind of fun!!

Group: Luiza Maceira de Almeida Neves , Maria Pia Barbieri Nader , Nathália Arranz Gomes de Paiva and Nathália Oliveira da Silva.
Class: 81

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