Connecting Brazilian Slum Residents to Resources

Dear donors, 

Here are the latest updates on the development of Vision!

Our project started with the Covid-19 outbreak and the critical impact that social distancing brought upon the community in Vidigal, as many of them relied on activities related to tourism and commerce at the beach for their income. Due to the large number of locals losing their jobs, a project named Rio Against Corona started to send emergency food kits to the organizations in Vidigal to distribute. They found difficulties with organizing the distribution and targeting the families that most needed the donations, and then Vision kicked in as a way to register eligible families, consolidating data from all acting NGOs and projects at Vidigal. 

Since the pandemic outbreak in 2020, Favela Inc. has registered over 1100 of families in partnership with 6 local organizations in Vidigal and created the first complete database built inside of the favela to monitor their state of vulnerability. Now we are converting the first version into a high quality application to provide more information and a better user experience, and shift to the real purpose of the project, which is to connect projects and companies to the residents of the favela, locating the matching candidates for open work, education and cultural opportunities.

For this purpose, Vision is currently developing the MVP version of the product. So far we have counted with a team of volunteer programmers who have started to develop the basic interface of the application. However, we have identified that the advancement of the project will depend on our ability to raise funds to invest in a dedicated team to develop the application. We want to partner with Vai na Web, an organization that offers training in technology to young residents of the favela and transforms them into qualified development squads, which we want to hire to build Vision. This way, we will be supporting a business that gives back to the community while tackling our greatest challenge with the project.

Our primary focus right now is conducting a partnership with Project Nau for a program of professional development for the youth through the current database of eligible individuals. Vision will be integrated in the project to register the families who participate in it and produce impact data to evaluate project effectiveness in real time. We happily announce that the CTO of Burger King Brasil, Michael Andrade de Souza, is joining our project as a mentor and an official member of Favela Inc’s technology counsel! He has vast experience in the development and funding of Big Data systems and applications, and will bring that to help us with Vision. 

Here are some of the accomplishments that Vision helped attain so far:

• 1180 registered families
• 6 contributing organizations with their assisted profiles
• 5876 emergency food kits distributed with the help of the app
• Hygiene products distributed: 4450 masks, 2440 units of hand sanitizer, as well as bottles of shampoo, conditioner, soap and cleaning products
• Bringing together community leaderships and establishing meetings between them every two weeks since then
• Donations from big companies such as Qualitá, Boticário, Nivea, L’Oréal, Natura etc.
• Partnerships with other projects are being discussed to connect them to the community through Vision

Your donations to Vision will be directed towards investing in the partnership with Vai na Web to have a team working on the application’s development, so at this moment we are raising funds and saving up to make that investment. We are very thankful for our donations and hope that we can reach that goal soon to boost the project! Thanks for trusting our idea and helping us make that plan come true. Our goal with Vision is to build a bridge between the favela and organizations that want to act in the community. Vision will act to bring opportunities and resources to people who would not have been seen or reached by these projects without that platform.

We would also like to let you know that GlobalGiving will be hosting the Bonus Day Campaign on July 14th. On that date, we will be receiving matches in donations to all our projects starting from the value of $100. If you are planning to make a donation of $100 or more to Vision or to our other projects, we kindly ask you to wait until July 14th to donate so that your donation can be matched and provide extra resources to the project! We will remind you by email and in our social network pages, so make sure you follow us on Instagram and Facebook! 

Thanks again for all of your support!

Links:

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