20.10.2021

Beacon supports social action to motivate reading

By Bruna Cronfli

Beacon supports the project “Fazendo Minha História”, via Rouanet Law, a reading mediation program, which offers seminars, supervision, and monitoring activities to prepare educators and volunteers to work with children and adolescents who live in shelters.

The project is one of the actions promoted by “Instituto Fazer História”, which has  been proving children and young people separated from their families with emotional, social and intellectual support since 2005. The organization is engaged in the struggle to protect and guarantee the rights of about 40,000 deprived people living in shelters. The goal is to provide them with the necessary tools to write their own stories and live a life of opportunities and empowerment, therefore interrupting a cycle of abandonment and violence.

The objectives of the project “Fazendo Minha História” are: implementing 10 libraries inside each shelter; training 50 educators and 100 volunteers as reading mediators; helping 200 children and adolescents to discover pleasure in reading; creating a memory book with each child by reconstructing their own memories and stories; collecting material to allow them the replication of the project autonomously.

In addition to this project, the Institute works with other programs, offering exceptional and temporary care for children in voluntary families, created and supervised until the moment children are taken back to their houses or to a substitute family. The project also promotes family and community living, which is made possible by volunteers willing to develop affective relationships; in addition to offering qualifying training for technicians and managers, free individual psychotherapy, and the autonomy process for young people leaving the project when they turn 18 years old.

“Over the last years, more than 16 thousand children and adolescents have benefited from the IFH programs. There has been more than 1,500 partnership sheltering services throughout Brazil, around 8,000 volunteers dedicated to our programs, 9,000 trained professionals and more than 50,000 books distributed to partnership services.”, says Daniela Vasconcellos, a volunteer in the institute.