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SEEDING THE FUTURE

Brazilian program combines charity with business

By Sascha Brodsky

Despite its image as a sun-drenched tourist paradise, Rio de Janeiro is also a rough city where unemployment hovers at 8.5 percent and an estimated 8 million children live on the streets.

Brazil’s impoverished government is making no dent in these problems. So Ancar, Brazil’s leading mall development firm, has stepped in. Over the past 10 years the company has provided medical treatment, job training, day care and a range of other social services to people living in some of the most wretched conditions in Latin America.

The company’s program, called Seeding the Future, is housed in a small building near Ancar’s Nova América Shopping Center, which is located in a section of Rio known for violent crime.

“It has changed our lives,” said Cristiane Cardoso da Silva, 30, a mother of five, who used to sell garlic on the streets until she got pregnant with Julio César, now 3. The boy goes to an Ancar-run day care center, which frees his mother to work during the day.

Ancar’s outreach fills a gaping hole in the Brazilian social welfare net, says Paulo Pompilio, a principal at Tasca, a Rio de Janeiro-based retail consulting firm.

“There’s nothing else like it in this country,” Pompilio said. “In general, private businesses don’t contribute to charities the way they do in the United States and Europe. There’s a huge need out there for more charities of this kind.”

Rio’s rich live in guarded compounds. In contrast, about 20 percent of the population lives in favelas — the shantytowns that cover the surrounding hillsides, crime-ridden and unsanitary, lacking in all the basic necessities.

With a murder rate of 61 per 100,000 people in 2004, Rio is one of the world’s most violent cities. This was more than twice sister city São Paulo’s rate of 28 per 100,000. In the early 1990s criminal gangs took over entire favela neighborhoods. At the same time, corrupt police officers murdered homeless children on the instructions of commercial interests trying to “clean up” the city, according to published reports.

In the face of such deprivation, shopping centers can be an important force for social change, “because they involve the whole community,” according to Mariana Carvalho, Ancar’s director of marketing and the daughter of company founder Sergio Andrade de Carvalho. “Business like this is such a powerful tool,” she said. “There are so many poor people in Brazil that we need private businesses to help. The government can’t do it alone.”

She also thinks it makes good business sense. “We generate a tremendous amount of goodwill among the local people because of our programs,” Mariana Carvalho said. “It shows in our malls. Rio has a big crime problem, but gang members don’t cause trouble in our properties, because they know that we are helping the people.”

Since its founding in 1972, Ancar has developed five shopping centers in Brazil, including the 450,000-square-foot Nova América Shopping Center and the enclosed, 370,000-square-foot Shopping Iguatemi, in Pôrto Alegre, the largest city in southern Brazil.

The Seeding the Future program has helped about 1,500 people since it was launched in 1995. “We were able to witness changes taking place in their lives and that of their families and the communities of our region,” said Joelma Carvalho da Conceição, the program’s general coordinator.

The history of Seeding the Future is intertwined with that of the shopping center where it is based. The building that houses the center was for 86 years the home of Nova América Textile Co., one of the largest textile manufacturers in the country. In 1991 the plant shut down, eliminating thousands of jobs. With the area still reeling from this and other economic blows, Ancar started its social welfare program only a year after the mall’s 1994 opening.

“We are a family company, and the ethos of our family has always been to try to help the community in any way we can,” Mariana Carvalho said.

Like all great journeys, this one began with a few small steps, offering 10 teen-agers a gardening course. By the end of that first year, the program had assisted about 50 people, including adolescents, senior citizens and children, and had blossomed into health care and other forms of social welfare.

Seeding the Future provides its enrollees — currently about 60 teen-agers, 30 seniors and six children — with full-time activities throughout the week. Youngsters receive classroom instruction in office skills and gain practical experience in Nova América Shopping Center’s stores and kiosks and surroundings. Such practical experience often leads to a career.

“Instead of hiring an outside company to do the gardening, we decided that we should set a good example by hiring them ourselves,” Mariana Carvalho said. Nova América has also gone on to hire many graduates of its job training program as office assistants, receptionists and messengers.

The program offers career paths outside the shopping center as well. In a five-month information-technology course, for instance, adolescents attend class twice a week in a room equipped with 20 computers, learning skills that will help them enter that field.

As for the medical services, pediatricians treat the children and advise their parents. Adolescents learn how to avoid HIV, a major scourge in Brazil. Health experts say some 660,000 people, about 0.7 percent of the population, are infected with HIV.

At the day care center, neighborhood children ranging from 4 months to almost 4 years old mingle with the children of the shopping center’s employees and retail owners. Food court tenants invite the children from the day care center for afternoon snacks.

“Each day our effort and dedication draw us closer to fulfilling our mission to create social inclusion opportunities for children, adolescents and senior citizens who are at social risk,” said Helena Costa Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, one of the program’s teachers. “We are contributing to the reduction of social inequalities.”

This has forged a strong bond between the mall and the community.

“Even on weekends, some of them work in the gardens,” Mariana Carvalho said. “And others can’t resist taking their children to the playground, to take a walk in the mall and to meet friends.”