Provide Quality Education to 15000 Amazon Children

Vaga Lume Retrospective 2024

Do you know what a forest of books is? That's what we’re going to show in the Vaga Lume 2024 Retrospective!

Network Activities
Throughout the year, we participated in various events to discuss the environment, education, literature, and the third sector. We must highlight our participation as speakers at the ABCR Festival and the Intercultural Innovation Hub São Paulo edition, with social organizations awarded by UNAOC.

Institutional Strengthening
We continued our journey of strengthening our governance structure, which brings together advisory councils and committees. We formed a powerful network of specialists from various fields of knowledge, all united by the purpose of ensuring access to reading for children and young people in the Amazon.

Vaga Lume Around the World
In partnership with the Kennedy Center, the Rede Program connected teenagers from the Amazon with young people from the United States and England in a special edition of the cultural exchange program. One of the most remarkable moments was the participation of Iarley Trindade, a regular at the Menino Deus library in Portel, who shone at an international festival in Washington, representing his community and Vaga Lume.

In addition to the international edition, the Rede Program also wove ties between communities in the Amazon and schools and social organizations in São Paulo, through virtual and face-to-face meetings, letter and gift exchanges. The educators involved in the program also participated in a committee with training on climate change, expanding horizons and strengthening connections.

Training
The year began with a rich exchange of experiences in the training of Vaga Lume's technical team, an essential step to boost all our deliveries in 2024. In April, we gathered our volunteers for the 4th Virtual Meeting, featuring the panel "Early Childhood and the Role of Literature", with the participation of award-winning authors and illustrators.

New Libraries
2024 was a year of planting new seeds with the opening of four more community libraries. We expanded our reach, arriving in a new municipality in the state of Amazonas, with institutional support from the Almerinda Malaquias Foundation: Novo Airão, which now has three new libraries.

In the state of Pará, we inaugurated a new reading space in Oriximiná, with financial support from the Instituto Tecendo Infâncias. With the new reading spaces, Vaga Lume now has 95 active libraries and 4 more in the implementation phase. Throughout the year, we continued to monitor our network of libraries and training for our volunteers. In 2024, we selected 150 titles that will be delivered to all Vaga Lume libraries, ensuring that each community has access to books with representation and diversity.

Beautification
With the support of Instituto FAR, two libraries received beautification to make the reading spaces even more welcoming for all children.

Partnerships
We invited our supporters to learn about the work carried out in Soure, Pará. They followed the training course for reading mediators and cultural presentations. Vaga Lume was one of the social organizations selected worldwide to participate in the HP digital equity acceleration program. With this initiative, 30 libraries will receive computers and printers, and volunteers from 16 municipalities will also receive equipment to assist in the management of reading spaces.

Dreams for 2025

All our achievements are the result of great collective work involving more than 800 volunteers, advisors, ambassadors, our technical team, partner companies, and donors like you. To all of you, our heartfelt thanks!

Mosaic with volunteer thank-you speech.

And you can also help us bring access to reading to even more children and young people in the Amazon, the true guardians of the forest. Follow us on social media, visit our website and donate!

To date, Vaga Lume has 95 community libraries and 4 more reading spaces in the implementation process across the Amazon. There are eight libraries in Castanhal by itself. Since 2001, Vaga Lume has distributed more than 177,000 books of literature and impacted more than 177,000 children and teenagers.

Unfortunately, the last few months haven't been all good news. Riverside communities in the Vaga Lume network may become isolated due to the historic drought, which scientists are already qualifying as the worst drought in Brazil's history. To give a clear idea, 200 municipalities in the country are in a state of extreme drought, according to the National Center for Natural Disaster Monitoring and Alerts (CEMADEN).

“Vaga Lume takes great care to hear the communities. In this process, the community alerted us to the expectation of drought and, in order to assist these people with the project, we moved up the timetable for setting up the libraries in Novo Airão by a month,” says Lia Jamra, Executive Director of Vaga Lume.

Rede Program: Vaga Lume's youth as guardians of the Amazon

Significantly, the Programa Rede initiative promotes cultural exchange between teenagers from rural Amazonian communities and the city of São Paulo. Since its inception, more than 5,000 teenagers have participated in the activities and exchanges of the program.

Through debates, workshops, meetings, and daily stories written in books, teenagers exchange experiences, multiplying environmental awareness and taking a leading role in defending and preserving forests.

The Rede Program becomes strategic in this scenario, bringing teenagers on board as protagonists in protecting the environment.

Promoting access and encouraging reading is one of the most fundamental initiatives to strengthen rural communities in the Amazon, offering tools to those who are most responsible for preserving the forest.

Your support in the form of donations has resulted in more books and libraries, and through the Rede Program meetings, the possibility of building new futures.

• Youth_exchange_in_the_Amazon.pdf (PDF)