JURITI
The Social Circus School of Eco-Citizenship in Juazeiro do Norte, Ceará

The Juriti Eco-Citizenship Institute promotes sustainable development to recover citizenship and preserve the environment. It acts in the areas of environmental education, culture, professional and teacher training, art, employment assistance and income-generation.
Their project, Support for Families of Teenagers in Assisted Freedom (GAF), is part of a program of action in human rights directed at the families of young people who are in conflict with the law. Dreams Can Be Foundation has been helping this project find support for several interrelated projects. GAF was started in 2005 to support crafts workshops for 25 young women and their families. These work-shops revitalize the local production of traditional cloth dolls and generate professional skills and income in a short time. The project has since expanded and is currently serving 75 women.

The principal objective of the project is to increase the income and improve the living conditions of the women and families that attend the project - many of whom have fled their poor rural communities’ population due to drought conditions-. Most have migrated to this city that also lacks not only any form of economic development; but also basic services such as public health, education, housing, power supply, law and order and suffering from ails such as lack of water supply, sewerage, sanitation, waste collection, roads, and a shortage of local markets. With an illiteracy rate of 45.6% and extremely high levels of unemployment – most people in the community live on less than one USD per day. In addition to the lack of education the population lacks economic development leading to skills training and any opportunity to gain employment in markets other than the informal job market, mostly as domestic servants (housekeepers). The project remedies this through their work on local community empowerment favoring sustainable rehabilitation and management of natural resources and the creation of new opportunities for the most vulnerable groups.

The specific project we are presenting here today to Discovering Latin America has been operating since 2005. It began as a project to teach doll making skills to a group of women heads of household who all had children in situations of delinquency. ‘Instituto de Eco-cidadania Juriti’ through their award winning project ‘Support for Families of Teenagers in Assisted Freedom’ (GAF) worked with the child courts to keep these children out of institutions and with their families. They began offering the doll making courses in order to create income generating opportunities for these women. Building on the achievements from other projects and this project in particular, the specific objectives include: (i) impoverished women heads of household improving their living and working conditions; (ii) women who possess newly acquired vocational skills through the doll making project have a venue in which to engage in income-generating activities; (iii) young unemployed women become involved in a micro-enterprise cooperative and acquire training and income and gain access to technical, marketing and basic financial services; (iv) the project has the added objective of reviving the cultural heritage of this traditional form of doll-making for this region; and (v) to develop income-generating activities, handicrafts and micro-enterprises that are usually engaged in by women and girls.

The geographic area of Brazil where this project is located is one of the most impoverished areas of the country. Located in the Northeast of Brazil, an area where a good many people migrate from into larger cities such as Rio and Sao Paulo in the hope of finding employment. They work on the fringes of society without the benefit of any social safety nets and often the work that they can find in their own communities amounts to some type of scavenging for resources. Abject misery is commonplace in their communities that suffer from extreme overcrowding in shantytown like areas that have sprung up without any city planning, but are really more like squatter communities located on land that was not being used in the most undesirable locations, like along side of rail road tracks. A typical shelter is made from scavenged materials held together with clay or cement; some are adobe and the average number of children per household is 2.6. The surrounding communities that the project serves have a population of approx. 60,000 families. Infant mortality here reaches levels similar to those in many parts of Africa and India.
Their communities suffer from high indices of alcoholism, child prostitution, and domestic violence. Illiteracy rates can top 50%. Average schooling is between 4 and 7 years. The projects that operate in the communities in this area are often the only social services available to many of the community’s inhabitants. Basic sanitation, like fresh clean running water are not available and the children often have skin ailments related to bathing in and drinking contaminated water. Public hospitals are far away and when reached are sub-substandard at best. The projects are often the only source of information and generally provide health clinics with visiting doctors and other health practitioners on a limited basis. They provide education in areas of sex education, family planning, STD education, personal hygiene, and conflict resolution in addition to their early childhood development classes such as alphabetization, school tutoring and classes in art education. Projects use theatre and other art forms to attract community members to educational shows that serve the purpose of disseminating information in areas of health and human rights and also offer a form of entertainment to the members of the community.

Project Juriti which has mounted the project Solidarity Studio to help women including a group of women that are the victims of domestic violence has many really great projects for the community that they serve. The women participating in the project will have the benefit of exposure to the highly motivated group of women that run Project Juriti as well as the solidarity that they will gain being in the company of the other women from the project that have their same experience. The children will also be a big part of the project and they will see their mothers gain strength and knowledge and the ability to solve their problems. A majority of the women were battered wives and many of their children have had run-ins with the law.
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The women that participate in the project Solidarity Studio were all teenage mothers as is typical in this region and also they are the children of teenagers often going back generations. Another generational legacy is poverty. This type of poverty is important to understand as unlike you and I these populations typically have no parent from which to learn about generating income or even once they have money, how to manage it and how to understand it. It is not inconceivable that this cycle of poverty can stretch back to the time of slavery. The Solidarity Studio now has 75 women receiving benefits from the project. Income generation skills that are developed through the craft of doll making; this craft not only delivers skills to these women but allows them to play a part in rescuing the heritage of the ‘Boneca de Pano’ a typical handmade Brazilian rag doll that goes back to a time before anyone there can remember.

Where we are going…The project Solidarity Studio is making great strides and quickly changing the way the women in this newly formed cooperative live and work, how they think about themselves and their futures, how they and their children plan for their futures and how they can work as a community to break themselves out of this cycle of poverty. Cristina and her team at Juriti have been meeting with funders and hope to soon have the resources to bring these three groups of women together into one space where they can create an even bigger network, share resources and information, and more readily monitor activities.