Reveal the creative and entrepreneurial

Ideas engineer, with Phd in structural analysis of complex problems. After working as a teacher in engineering courses, I decided to found IPTI because I believe that the main meaning of life is to transform, to do our best to make the world better than we received, and I needed an agile organization, which recognize failure as an essential element of success and knows how to work together with society to build effective, scalable and sustainable solutions for social problems. Between 2004 and 2007, I coordinated an experience of implementing digital culture in 600 cultural Brazilian NGOs and along the process we conceived The Human Project (THP), a proposal of how art, science and technology can promote human development in communities of extreme poverty. In 2009 we moved IPTI from São Paulo to Santa Luzia do Itanhy, one of the poorest towns in Brazil, which has become THP global lab.

We work to solve the problem of inter-generational transfer of poverty in small towns, located in remote rural regions, with special emphasis on children and adolescents who gradually end up being captured by the feeling of conformity and surrendered to the destiny to which they seem to be condemned, mainly because of the low quality education that hinders processes of human capital accumulation. Our project (The Human Project) proposes a holistic and virtuous cycle of development of effective, scalable and sustainable innovative solutions for problems in basic education, entrepreneurial education and basic health in close partnership with the local community, as a strategy to improve human capital. Two pillars (ethics and identity) are worked across in all of our projects, with a perspective for changing local mindset, so that each person realizes their potential for personal and community transformation and this is our strategy to elevate humanity.

The problem of inter-generational transfer of poverty in small towns, located in remote rural regions, is usually a consequence of a self-reinforcing mechanism that blocks opportunities for social and economic development and forces people to remain poor, also known as poverty trap. Some of the main factors that trap population groups in such processes of chronic poverty are related to limited possibilities to accumulate human capital (high proportion of illiterate people and a low mean level of educational attainment among the people aged 15 years and over), geographic isolation and poor connections to bigger markets, limited and low value possibilities of work and income, poor quality of basic infrastructure (low coverage levels of clean water and sewage system), among others. On the other hand, there is a mentality of high distrust, dependence of welfare, short-term thinking and low self-esteem that also contributes to crystallize a local underdeveloped mindset. This problem affects millions of people, mainly in south hemisphere countries. In Brazil more then 35% (+2,000) of the municipalities present high level of socio-economic vulnerability and the majority are located in north and northeastern regions.

“The Human Project” is our model to promote economic and social prosperity in poverty-stricken towns and it is essentially based on the formation of human capital, in a long-term perspective, with the goal of extracting poverty from people's mind and revealing these people's creative and entrepreneurial potential, so that they become the main protagonists of change. In this sense, IPTI creates strategies, methodologies and tools to engage members of the communities to develop innovative solutions to their own problems and the end products are known as Social Technologies (ST). At the core of Social Technologies are effectiveness, scalability and sustainability. IPTI applies a systemic and evolutionary perspective to build social technologies that implement a virtuous cycle of the capital formation process with special focus on children and adolescents. So, we build ST's to provide children having access to high quality education in language and maths, to provide to all adolescents the opportunity to explore their potential to become entrepreneur in creative and digital business, focusing on initiatives that aim at value-added products that take advantage of the local identity. Finally, the cycle goes by building ST's to provide children and adolescents basic health (ex: food security, iron deficiency anemia).

Our global lab is Santa Luzia do Itanhy, a little town located in south of Sergipe state, in the northeastern in Brazil, which socio-economic conditions represents many of the contexts of regions we want to help. This town has 14,000 inhabitants, of which 59% live in conditions of poverty (average income below U$ 2 PPP), with 9,000 inhabitants living in rural communities. Less than 21% of the students reach the fifth year of elementary school with adequate performance in maths and language and the illiteracy rate is 29%. The vast majority of the population is of African descent, the local economy is essentially based on artisanal fishing and small farmers. The municipality is surrounded by mangroves, the region's main ecosystem. All social technologies generated in Santa Luzia do Itanhy aim to solve a local problem and the people involved with the problem work together with us as co-designers of the solution since the first beginning and later they act also as disseminators of the technologies to other regions, in addition to being encouraged to become entrepreneurs, by creating for-profit or non-profit social business.

Our experience is well-aligned with the first (Elevating opportunities for all people, especially those who are traditionally left behind) and third dimension (Elevating understanding of and between people through changing people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors) of The Elevate Prize because our work is mainly focused on small towns, located in remote rural regions, a typical scenario of people and places traditionally left behind, and our mission is to arouse the transforming role of people, so that they can make a difference in their community, in Brazil and in the world, which means an effort to chance local mindset.

We founded IPTI in the city of São Paulo (2003) and the idea behind was to employ science and technology to generate innovative solutions to improve people's lives, especially in poor communities. Throughout the work in the digital culture project (2004-2007) we realized that in order to achieve what we dreamed it was necessary to add art to the model, change the organization to a community of extreme poverty, which was small and represented the majority of the communities that we would like to help, and that we needed to learn how to dialogue with this community, because an important part of the knowledge necessary to generate these innovative solutions, in an effective, scalable and sustainable way, belongs to the people from the community and they do not even know that they know. So we moved to Santa Luzia do Itanhy and over the past few years we have managed to compose a team whose main skill is the ability to mediate scientific and technological knowledge with the community knowledge, without no fear of failing and taking into account the IPTI values: Local grounding/global articulation; Commitment to innovation; Poetics of difference; Visible and invisible dynamic; Empathy; Confidence, perseverance and overcoming.

I was born in Sergipe, in northeastern Brazil, and I always lived surrounded by the problem of social inequality. I was privileged to be born in a middle class family, which was able to give me a quality education and access to culture. My grandfather had a small orange farm where I used to spent my vacation. While I was a child I used to play with the children of the community, all belonging to poor families, but there were no differences between us. As I grew up I started to perceive inequality. I continued to attend schools and museums while most of my little friends had to work to help their parents and many had to leave the school. I spent a good part of my life developing my academic career, but memories as a spectator of inequalities in Brazil always bothered me, until the moment I decided to act, first by resigning from the university and creating the IPTI and later moving IPTI to Santa Luzia do Itanhy. I had no previous personal connection with Santa Luzia do Itanhy, but I had personal connections with the stories of people who live in communities like Santa Luzia do Itanhy.

My main skills are resilience and faith, in this case faith in society's capacity to undertake and solve its own problems, without depending on third parties, including governments. My formation in engineering has contributed a lot for me to be able to advance with pragmatism towards my utopia. The experience I had of working with hundreds of art and culture communities, from all regions of Brazil, over 3 years, opened my mind to realize how wrong I was when trying to carry out the dialogue between art, science, technology and society (as a Phd I used to carry a non intentional arrogance to believe that I always had the best solutions). Finally, the fact that I live in Santa Luzia do Itanhy and I work with incredible and creative people from this little town, while having access to corporations and social investors from around the world, puts me and IPTI in a unique position to be able to solve the problem of poverty trap in small and remote towns.

The main obstacle was dealing with the mentality of social investors (companies and individuals) who usually want short-term solutions, maximum impact in terms of the number of beneficiaries and have difficulty in understanding systemic approaches. Our model is systemic, focuses on innovation, consequently involves few people (pilot group) and has a higher development cost, and considers scalability and sustainability in a long-term perspective, only after we achieve at a reliable and effective local version and with people from the community with capacity to act as disseminators to other people and regions. In addition, we chose to move our center from São Paulo, an important economic center in Brazil, to Santa Luzia do Itanhy, a little, poor and remote town. So, getting financial support in the beginning was quite difficult, but at no time we give up what we believed in and now we have results that help us to attract the interest of new investors, both in Brazil and abroad, and inspire people and communities to believe they can make the difference. In the beginning I was called as “crazy” and now I am called “visionary”, which to me is nothing more than a crazy person with reputation.

My leadership role is to encourage all people that work with us to do their best and be able to produce results that are positive for the society and for themselves and to transmit a sense of confidence, e.g. they can count on me to overcome hard moments. A specific moment that highlights this attitude was in the beginning of 2017. We had a 3-year contract (2016-2018) with the State Secretariat of Education to validate the scalability model of the social technology Synapse in 130 schools from different cities. The Secretariat started to delay payments and when we reached the limit of our reserves we had to decide to cancel the project and fire the team or take a huge risk of continuing and maybe never receive the remaining budget. My decision was to continue, I went through the worst year of my life, with debts growing every month, but I avoid to transmit the problems to the team, because I believed that we were generating something that could transform education in Brazil. The result is wonderful and today we have a network of teachers who preserves the project autonomously (see: https://vimeo.com/408840562). The Secretariat finished to pay us in 2020.

One aspect that makes our work unique is the holistic and evolutionary perspective in the generation of social technologies, so that we seek to generate solutions for all the main factors that hinder human development, especially in children and adolescents. Another aspect is that our model places the people of the community in the active role of co-designers of the solution, so that these solutions take into account local difficulties and competences, and places them also in the active role of disseminators of social technologies, ensuring scalability with efficiency and reduced cost and inspiring people through the communities they pass through. A third aspect is the orientation towards social business of all the social technologies generated, which can be for profit (https://en.casadocacete.com/; http://citii.com.br/; https://vixefilmes.com/) or non-profit (www.rps.ong.br), as a strategy to ensure financial sustainability and expand the possibilities of scale, reducing dependence on unstable supporters, such as government, for example.

Our experience in Santa Luzia do Itanhy has brought tangible proves that it is possible to break the poverty trap when we offer conditions for a high quality education, within a holistic and long-term perspective of working with the main key variables of the learning process, which also requires local empowerment and financial sustainability. This experience makes the eyes of people from other communities shine when we have the opportunity to present, and what they need is the support of organizations like IPTI to transform the short-term dream, built in that moment of wonder, into a new and beautiful reality, built in the medium and long term, with empathy, truth and goodness (“beauty can save the world”). For this reason, we hope to reapply the case of Santa Luzia do Itanhy in thousands of small and remote cities, all around the world, to build a global network of organizations that develop, improve and disseminate social technologies and promote human development in their respective communities.

Currently we benefit more than 10,000 people, per year, 700 direct beneficiaries and 10,000 traceable indirect beneficiaries and more then 50,000 non-traceable indirect beneficiaries, from Santa Luzia do Itanhy and many other cities in Brazil. For the next year we expect to direct benefit more then 1,000 people, with more then 15,000 traceable indirect beneficiaries, and in 5 years more then 2,000 people and more then 50,000 traceable indirect beneficiaries and more then 200,000 non-traceable indirect beneficiaries.

Our main goals within the next year are consolidating Synapse Network of Teachers (RPS) as an autonomous and financial sustainable social entrepreneur initiative headed by teachers of public schools; assuring financial resources for the further development of Synapse Child Education and to start the development of social technologies in areas of early childhood and food security, in this case connecting with family farming; and enabling a first reapplication of the Santa Luzia do Itanhy model in another community in Brazil or in other Latin American country (eg Colombia). Within the next 5 years our main goals are that we have created conditions for all children in Santa Luzia do Itanhy to reach 8 years old with quality education and health; that we have at least 10 companies established in Santa Luzia do Itanhy, led by teenagers trained in our entrepreneurial education projects; that we have at least 5 experiences of reapplication of the Santa Luzia do Itanhy model in Brazil and other countries, especially in Africa and Latin America; and that we have implemented our endowment.

The barriers to consolidate RPS are cultural and financial because it requires that the values of the Network be incorporated by all the teachers involved and requires that civil society engage in this cause, providing reputation and financial resources. The barrier to continue the development of the Synapse Child Education is only financial, but the main barrier to raising funds for the development of social technologies in early childhood and food security is cultural, because in both cases we are talking about very complex problems, that require multidimensional solutions, and usually social investors have a reductionist vision, preferring to support a specific theme at a time. In the case of the goal of reapplying the Santa Luzia do Itanhy model in other communities, the barrier is mainly financial. In the perspective of the next 5 years, the barriers mentioned above are the same, and in the case of the objective of generating business (companies) there is also the market barrier, since customers are distant as well as the young entrepreneurs from Santa Luzia do Itanhy will have difficulties in accessing credit. Finally, the barrier to reaching the goal of having an endowment by 2025 is not having experience in the subject and we need to arrive in 2024 with impact indicators that transmit confidence to potential donors to see IPTI as an organization that is worth making large donations to ensure its sustainability in a long-term perspective.

With regard to RPS, we are going to launch next October a national campaign, in partnership with Globo TV, with the objective of raising the attention of society about the shame of having so many children with access to poor quality education in Brazil and calling to join the cause. This campaign will be followed by a permanent series of communication initiatives. About Synapse Child Education all funding from the IPTI 2020 annual event will revert to financing the continued development of this social technology in 2021. For the case of early childhood, we managed to gather important private foundations, Brazilian and international, that deal with this theme and we are building together a multidimensional proposal, with the expectation that some of these foundations will be the main supporters of the execution of the project. For food security, we are working with food companies, renowned chefs and family farming support organizations to have a proposal designed jointly and to give confidence to social investors. In the case of market access and credit, we are conducting training in English, so that entrepreneurs can communicate with customers and partners from any country, we will open a SME's incubator by the end of 2020 and we are designing a marketshare and credit platform (crowdfunding and/or landfunding). On the endowment challenge, we established a partnership with Rice University for the development and application of impact indicators on human capital formation, so that we have significant results to communicate by 2024.

We have funding partnerships with companies like AB-Inbev, Bayer, Microsoft, Petrobras, SAP, with corporative foundations and institutes like BrazilFoundation, Garcia Family Foundation, Itaú Social Foundation, OI Futuro Institute, Telefônica Foundation, Vale Foundation, with international organizations like UNESCO, PAHO, UNDP, and with public sector in Brazil, like Ministry for Science, Technology and Innovation, State Government of Sergipe, among others. We also have cooperation partnerships for research and development of social technologies with organizations in Brazil and abroad, like University of São Paulo (São Carlos, Brasil), Rice University (Texas, USA) and Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil.

We also help to conceive and establish a 501(c)3 organization in United States, in NYC, named IPTI [US], which goal is to raise funds to support the development and dissemination of social technologies in Brazil and abroad. Currently IPTI and IPTI [US] are focused in Brazil but soon we expect to work together with other communities around the world to help them to implement their own art, science and technology organization and their own human development model, inspired in the case of Santa Luzia do Itanhy.

Our main service for the community of Santa Luzia do Itanhy is described in our mission, which is “To arouse the transforming role of people, so that they can make a difference in their community, in Brazil and in the world”. In this sense, we identify a problem or an opportunity and involve the main stakeholders of the community in the whole process of conception, development and validation of the social technology that aims to solve the problem. After this technology reaches a reliable level of effectiveness, the main beneficiaries start to act as disseminators of the solution to other communities and we work together to transform the social technology or the knowledge generated by it into social businesses, aiming to ensure sustainability and generate work and income. This cycle empowers these people into agents of change, promotes confidence and self-esteem, and inspires new generations of indirect beneficiaries. Here it is worth mentioning a phrase by Bernard Shaw, from the book “Socialism for millionaires”, written in 1901, in which he says that “never give the people anything they want; give them something they ought to want and don't”, because we are talking about generating innovation in communities of extreme poverty, whose needs are very basic, to survive. If we really want to generate transformation it is necessary to go beyond the basics and we cannot expect that people of these communities are able to tell us what they really need to escape the poverty trap.

IPTI was able to establish an extensive network of supporters, including private companies, governments, international organizations and donors, in this case especially during our annual events in New York and São Paulo, and in 2021 we will start a representation in London (UK). IPTI also carries out some consultancy initiatives, always related to social technologies. The resources coming from private partners, public and international organizations are usually fully dedicated to the development of projects, with little or no overhead. The consultancy's resources allow a better margin of overhead, while the funds raised in the events cover the rest of the organization's operating costs and unpredictable expenses, with the remaining budget being invested in projects. Since 2018, the organization has managed to raise revenue higher than expenses and the goal by 2022 is to set up a reserve fund in an amount sufficient for 12 months of operation of the organization. In the long term, we aim to implement our endowment, which will facilitate the investment of own resources in projects with greater complexity and greater risks, which are the most difficult to obtain financial support, at least at the beginning of the project, in the proof of concept phase.

In the past 12 months we have received a total of $ 858,400, from different sources of funds:

Private sector: Bayer (grant: U$ 72,000); SAP (grant: U$ 35,000); Vale Foundation (grant: U$ 154,000); Telefônica Foundation (grant: U$ 7,600); AmBev (grant: U$ 48,000) Others (grant: U$ 5,900)

Public sector: Government of Sergipe (grant: U$ 324,000)

Donors: (grant: U$ 204,300)

Services: U$ 1,900

Awards: (grant: U$ 5,700)

Aside from the fundraising efforts for the continuity and improvement of ongoing social technologies, over the next 3 years we will endeavor to raise approximately US 1,350,000 to cover investments in the completion of Synapse Child Education social technology, in the consolidation of the Synapse Teacher Network (RPS), in the development of social technology for early childhood and in an experience of reapplication of The Human Project in another extreme poverty community in Brazil. Of this total, we expect to have secured U$ 770,000 from donors and investors with whom we have already initiated dialogue, leaving a difference of U$ 580,000 to raise. We expect to raise U$ 170k by 2021, U$ 120k by 2022 and U$ 290k by 2023 to cover this total amount.

U$ 650,000

I dream that one day the experience we are building in Santa Luzia do Itanhy will inspire and be reapplicated in thousands of little towns around the world, mainly in the southern hemisphere, forming a global chain of transformation agents, structured in values such as empathy, poetics of difference, local grounding/global articulation...

The Elevate Prize is looking to support and create a multiplier effect for experiences like ours and being one of the finalists of this Prize will bring visibility and reputation to our work, which will certainly expand our capacity to scale, to develop new social technologies and, mainly, to impact more lives and inspire more people to become protagonists of change in their own communities.

We want to establish partnerships with organizations that are interested in developing social technologies with us, by financing and/or by bringing complementary knowledge to help to solve the problem in the best and low cost possible manner and having Santa Luzia do Itanhy as a lab. We are also interested in partnerships with organizations that are interested in disseminating the social technologies generated in Santa Luzia do Itanhy to other communities, in Brazil and in other countries, as well as reapplying the Human Project model in other cities in Brazil and other countries, which has similar social and economic conditions. In this case, we have been in dialogue with companies in the sectors of oil and gas, infrastructure, mining, energy, forests and agribusiness, because they usually make large and long term investments in small, remote and in many cases very poor regions. In these cases, companies have social investments obligations but end up investing in short-term actions and without including long-term human capital formation, despite the fact they have the financial resources and long-term mandate to fulfill. In other words, The Human Project can be the difference between leaving a positive legacy instead of a social and environmental liability. They just need patience and perseverance, because it will take a few years to achieve tangible results to communicate to their shareholders but we have the case of Santa Luzia do Itanhy to prove it is possible and beautiful.