Organic food & education for families in Rio slum

Dear donors,

Since our last update in May Favela Inc. has been extremely busy bringing on new employees, analyzing the results of our work throughout this year and the pandemic and building a brand new brand design launch. Throughout the course of the pandemic our organization has grown immensely from just 3 employees to more than 7 full-time and part time employee and a network of nearly 50 volunteers. But along with growth comes increased responsibility and our dedication to favela communities goes beyond 2021. We are fully committed to creating projects that create long-term, sustainable, systemic impact and in order to do that we have needed to take a small step, reorganize, analyze and prepare for the future. Coming in January of 2022 we will launch the new and improved favela inc brand combined with a dynamic plan to guarantee the success of our initiatives, this especially includes Agrofavela.

Since our last update on Agrofavela these are some of the things we have been working on:

Mapping local green projects in the favela

Beyond our own programming we understand that to help a favela become an Agrofavela it is imperative that the locally run “green” projects have access to the knowledge, resources and support essential to achieving long-term success. We are currently mapping out local projects such as community run gardens, reforesting initiatives, recycling collectives and local cleanup groups. After mapping these projects we will engage them individually and through a dynamic selection process choose a selection of initiatives to incubate and support. 

Orgânico Solidário integration of the course in other communities - viability analysis

After the successful running of our inaugural Agrofavela course we conducted post course surveys in order to understand how we can improve the quality of our methodologies and content. Through this analysis we have determined a variety of core improvements we can make so rather than immediately beginning an additional term we are taking a step back to adjust and improve in order to come back strong soon with a course that is better than ever. Beyond this, we are conversing with our partner Organico Solidario as well as other sustainable education projects in favelas throughout Brazil to think about how we can scale our content to other communities in the best way possible. We look forward to sharing with you soon our plan to graduate even more health and sustainability ambassadors in the favela.

Community sustainability ambassadors

One of the main feedbacks we got from the students from our course was that they were looking for what to do next once the course was finished. We realized that by the end of the course these students had naturally become local ambassadors of health and sustainability. Therefore we are currently devising a plan to work with our course graduates to arm them with tools and resources so that they can continue to apply the knowledge acquired in their community in a way that inspires others to make positive changes in their life and get involved in the health of the greater community. This will include engaging the local non profits that helped us select the students who participated so together we can launch community health awareness campaigns that include teaching others about planting their food, improving their relationship with nature, increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables in their diets as well as organizing community cleanup initiatives.

Thanks again for your continued support of Favela Inc. and Agrofavela and we look forward to having you with us along this journey to help cultivate Favelas that are healthier and happier.

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