CEPAC (Associação para Proteção das Crianças e Adolescentes), is a charity in São Paulo, Brazil, that supports young people with education and employability skills in a number of ways. Besides funding residences for around 20 young people who are at risk, CEPAC also delivers extra-curricular activities for around 500 young people.
CEPAC is located in the neighbourhood close to our São Paulo office and we have been partnering with them for more than 3 years. This support has included a number of initiatives ranging from a Recycling workshop as part of our Green Week activities to a team day building and donating resources to their library. This year CEPAC were chosen as our regional charity partners and we were able to support a Sarau (cultural event) “Ciranda de Cordel”, as part of the reading activities carried out by CEPAC throughout the year.
In the first part of this project, a group of young people visited a city where Monteiro Lobato, one of Brazil's most influential children’s writers, was born. It was a full and very funny day. Then the group had classes and workshops to encourage them to write poetries in “cordel” format (a very typical style in the Northeast of Brazil) and also to discuss issues related to sustainability, female empowerment and racism. CEPAC organized an event where the poems created by the group were exhibited and they had the chance to recite them and to perform to music. As a recognition of the work accomplished, the authors of the best poems received prizes.
“When I sang, I felt free and felt that nobody was going to knock me down. I felt safe, realized that we should not worry about the past, but about the future. My first Sarau was amazing, I loved it all!” - Ester B. De Moura
CEPAC is very focused on projects to promote reading and writing activities and principally, promote critical thinking among the young people they are working with. It was a very humbling experience to see 11 year old children reflecting and writing on a number of topics including the importance of taking care of the environment, attitudes towards the future of the planet, and young girls discussing female empowerment. Euromonitor is company that produces strategic information to help decision makers think outside the box. There is strong synergy between CEPAC and Euromonitor and we are very glad and to be a strategic partner for CEPAC. We look forward to working with them again in the future.
Our partnership with CEPAC enables us to work towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, part of our commitment as signatories to the United Nations Global Compact.
