Provide Quality Education to 15000 Amazon Children

Vaga Lume's activities are focused on the Amazon rainforest, one of the most important regions in the world due to its cultural and environmental diversity. The Amazon rainforest spreads across eight countries where 33 million people and 385 indigenous ethnicities live. Nine Brazilian states are coved by the forest and Vaga Lume has libraries in all of them. There are 86 libraries distributed in 22 municipalities that impact 12.788 children and youngsters every year.

At the 9^th Vaga Lume's Congress last September, we reunited 76 volunteers from the Amazon so that they can share their experience and point of view. While other people see the problem from the outside, they do face directly all the effects of Amazon deforestation as it roars ahead. In 2019, the record of the Amazon destruction was intensified and considering the period between January and October there was an increase of 80% in the deforested area if compared to the same period in 2018. (Source: Inpe). In their statements, volunteers highlighted the interests in the dispute for the territory: the increase of illegal logging, the expansion of soybean and eucalyptus cultivation, the increase of livestock and mining, and the communities and peoples in defense of their conservation.

Keeping that in mind, Vaga Lume's mission to empower children from rural communities in the Amazon is getting more and more relevant. Vaga Lume acts in the formation of a network of people committed to the transformation through book and reading. We aim to empower children and youngsters so they can make the right choices for the preservation of the environment and local culture. We do not doubt that to plant and grow even more seeds, we can count on even more committed volunteers whether in the Amazon, in São Paulo, or anywhere else in the world.

The almost two decades of Vaga Lume performance have been a learning time. The hard mission of empowering children from rural communities in the Amazon through community libraries requires great maturity and an effective strategy to face all challenges that come by. Distance and lack of infrastructure in the communities that, most of the times, not even have permanent electricity require structured local partnerships and very well-defined logistics processes; the fundraising work requires the need of diversifying our partnerships in a way to ensure our financial autonomy; the extensive volunteer's network, donors and collaborators implies a work of constant engagement. Therefore, a strong and well-structured basis is essential for achieving our biggest dreams.

With that in mind, in 2019 Vaga Lume took a step toward an organizational maturity to be able to broaden its horizons. Our desire to make community libraries to become real in the entire Amazon makes our challenge as big as our ambition. That way, after a long process of strategic planning, we have created Vaga Lume 2030 Plan that establishes short, medium and long-term goals.

Going further into the community’s journey (Jornada da Comunidade) is our first step to better understand where we are and where we want to be. The community’s journey was developed to reach full engagement to the libraries in order to strike balance between Vaga Lume's engagement and the community involvement. The main goal to set our journey is to ensure autonomy and community articulation around the library and, consequently, increase the project's impact. By using this model for the journey, Vaga Lume aims to impact 180,000 children and youngers in the Amazon by managing 300 rural community libraries by the next decade.

If our volunteer network committed with social change through reading enabled uncountable results since 2001, we undoubtedly believe that we can count on many more committed people to plant and make grow more seeds in the Amazon, São Paulo or any other spot in the world.