Movimento Transformers - Associação Juvenil Transformers

The lack of volunteering and civic engagement is still a reality in most European countries. Most youngsters are not civically engaged within their local communities, leading to social alienation, apathy, and inaction. In 2015, 41.1 % of all Europeans stated that they were not interested in participating in active citizenship activities (Eurostat).

After almost 11 years working in Portugal and having proven impact results, we want to scale to places and communities that need our methodology in order to empower young people, activate their voices, and have a stronger social impact.

However, we don’t have the funds to support this expansion to European countries, where we believe this program is needed. 

We already validated this problem is real in other countries and that our solution might be an effective solution to these realities. To show our commitment to this expansion, we started conversations with some organizations in Spain, Italy and Slovenia. All these countries have lower volunteering rates than the average of the European Union, which makes them good candidates for our program.

The award money will fund our international expansion while we validate our methodology in these countries and review the international methodology and business model.

I’m restless and I don’t wait for change.

My journey started in 2006 when through volunteering, my purpose was becoming clear, to contribute to a world where everyone has the same opportunities. That’s what Movimento Transformers do. Ensure that regardless of where you were born, you can learn new skills and become a leader in your community.
I worked in youth centers and prisons, centers for disabled people, and several vulnerable neighborhoods, always with this purpose in mind. In São Tome & Principe, during an international mission, I worked with 150 kids to help them use their talents to minimize the problems of the community. 

I’ve been a trainer and mentor in several impact entrepreneurship programs at IES - Social Business School and trained more than 500 potential social entrepreneurs. In 2020, co-founded MAD Panda, a platform focused on supporting animal protection organizations, that has already avoided 8 tons of ration loss. 

Through my work, a TEDx guest speaker and now being recognized as one of the Top 100 Women in Social Enterprise (Europe), I’m always looking to amplify my voice and the impact I can generate.

Now, I’m ready for the next challenge. To work on our international expansion! 

The volunteering rates of European formal volunteering and informal volunteering activities during the last 12 months (preceding the study) were, respectively, 19,3% vs 22,2%.

There are major differences among countries in the numbers and that can be due to cultural or social structures but it was observed in all participating European countries that educational attainment strongly influences the voluntary-participation patterns with the lowest volunteering participation rate being 11,5% for people with less than primary, primary and lower secondary education (Eurostat). And that's where our target is.

Movimento Transformers is a national organization whose mission is to increase civic and social participation. We work on 20 cities with three different projects:

- "Superpowers school": a project to promote local volunteering through the talents of the communities, where volunteer mentors train learners (young people at risk and isolated seniors) to be more active and participative citizens in their communities.

- XLead and T-Academy: online programs focused on civic and social participation with the goal of democratizing access to content about volunteering and non-formal education for youth leaders of NGOs and social organizations.

Since 2010, we worked with more than 4000 learners, 500 volunteer mentors, and many lives were improved by our work.

Our uniqueness is based on two factors: intervention model and scalability.

We have a model where volunteers train learners (youngsters at risk and isolated elders) to be more active and participative citizens in their community. We implement a four-step process:
1. Selective recruitment to ensure mentors are motivated, capable and committed.
2. Training weekend focused on sharing our methodology.
3. Match: learners are the ones choosing the talents they want to learn which helps ensure they are motivated to be part of the program.
4. Implementation: during one school year, our mentors have weekly sessions with our learners, teaching them the talent but also working on other relevant skills (communication, teamwork, creativity, gender equality, climate change, etc)
5. Payback: is the big innovation of the project. Each group identifies a problem from school or their community to work on and through the talent, they have learned they focus on minimizing it.
This process ensures both mentors and learners are giving back to society.
Regarding scalability, our methodology is considered a reference model by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and our process is codified (steps of the project, toolkits, etc) which facilitates the scaling process to other countries and cities.

We have been developing an impact assessment model with the  Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto in the last three years, in order to understand the impact we are creating with our work. This model consists of a pre and post-test applied to young people (before and after the project) to analyze the changes generated by our intervention in dimensions such as school success, self-esteem, peer involvement, social values and social cohesion. We have already proved that, with our intervention, we have reduced the academic failure rate of students by 44%! 

Better academic results lead to an increase of self-esteem, sense of belonging, responsibility, and autonomy of youngsters, increased respect for cultural diversity, and a clearer identification with positive role models. All these characteristics have a huge influence on communities making them socially engaged and led by our incredible Transformers. 

77% of our learners start doing volunteer work after one year with us which completes the transformation cycle!