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Nova America centered on aiding community

By Debra Hazel

It's a facility that offers day care; classes to train day-care workers and landscapers; senior citizen programs and counseling sessions. But it's not a university, or a hospital, or a social services center. It's a factory outlet center. In Brazil.

Continuing its practice of tying its projects to the communities, Ancar S.A., the developer of Nova America in Rio de Janeiro, has created Seeding the Future, a five-pronged program that helps various communities in its surrounding area. Lia de Carvalho, founder of the program and wife of company president and director Sergio Andrade de Carvalho, recently explained the program to a gathering at the United Nations.

Seeding the Future is a successor to Ancar's Cruzada do Menor (Children's Crusade), which helped rescue homeless children and teenagers from Rio's streets, giving them work making items that are sold at the firm's centers. While the earlier project did help keep teenagers off the streets and from using drugs, its success was hard to quantify. It was the search for a program that would have measurable results to show other communities and its backers that led Carvalho to Seeding the Future.

Mrs. Carvalho related the particulars of the new program to a meeting of the International Council of Caring Communities, held at the United Nations in New York in February.

"[The council] went to ICSC if they knew of any interesting programs, and John Konarski got in touch," she related.

"The International Council of Caring Communities is a nongovernmental organization [ONG in Portuguese] affiliated with the U.N.," said Konarski, ICSC's senior vice president of research and public relations. "Last year, in my talk to them in relation to the Year of the Older Person, I discussed mall-walking programs, and also gave the example of Lia's program. And I told them that if I were you, I'd talk to Lia herself."

The five-pronged program is the result of a three-year study on how best to help an area that had suffered greatly from the 1992 closing of the Nova America factory. The abandoned building became a dumping ground for the bodies of victims of Rio's drug wars. That changed when Ancar converted the building into a U.S.-style outlet mall.

"Nova America was a factory; now it is a factory outlet center," Carvalho said. And a center of its community.

The mall seeks to help its impoverished neighborhood by training teenagers in landscaping skills; offering community child day-care facilities; a professional training program for young day-care workers; a senior-care program that also helps them supplement their income; and counseling. The program was created by Carvalho in association with the city of Rio de Janeiro.

"This is much more than a partnership. ONG is a connection between the private sector and the community; Cruzada is the bridge," said Carvalho, a practicing psychologist who also serves as head of the Brazilian Psychological Association.

The program even predated the 1995 opening of the super-regional center.

"The program actually began six months before the center opening because of the landscaping," she said.

The landscaping program has now trained 90 teenagers, who spend six months learning landscaping skills, working at the mall. The program handles 25 youths at one time.

"After that, they have to be prepared to work for a regular company. We now have between 65% and 70% of them employed," some of them by companies with which Ancar does business, she said.

The day-care facility, which is open to the low-income families in the area, not just center workers, can handle up to 100 people, including 20 senior citizens, in a former factory guest house.

"The day care started about a year after the landscaping," Carvalho explained. The training program was a natural outgrowth of the service.

"We had a problem with shifts -- we needed help in the early mornings and late afternoon, but couldn't afford to hire enough workers. So we hired young girls. Every six months, we hire 15 girls," she said.

The year-old-program teaches the girls (and one male) the importance of professionalism as well as basic child-care skills.

"They learn how to present themselves, how to be on time," she said.

The eldercare provides activities and work for the seniors.

"They knit or do embroidery, and are paid. They have organized themselves into a cooperative. They do well, and their health is so much better," Carvalho said.

A doctor is on call, a nurse visits the center three times weekly, and a community health agent is on site every day. The children and the elderly are given four meals a day, provided by the mayor of Rio de Janeiro. Some funding also is derived from the center's marketing fund.

The last element of the program consists of group counseling sessions, during which the poor of the community are given encouragement to better their situation.

The latest evolution of the Cruzada has given the Carvalhos both personal and professional benefits.

"We gain a lot from this, a lot of pleasure," Carvalho said.

And to an extent, she laughed, the program also helps her family life.

"My whole family eats, drinks, breathes shopping centers. I'm a psychologist -- so I had to build a bridge so I wouldn't be alone."