“Ethical Markets is proud to be a partner with SINAL DO VALE and to have its founder Thais Corral on our global Advisory Board. ~Hazel Henderson, Editor”
SINAL hosts an Educational Program with Social Entrepreneurs from around the Globe
Sinal do Vale, an agro-ecological farm located in the APA of Petropolis, Xerem, Duque de Caxias Municipality, is hosting in its 400-acre campus a delegation of 17 young entrepreneurs from all around the globe to develop innovative solutions to close the gap of global youth unemployment. Today there are 200 million people reported as unemployed by ILO, and in Brazil, the number is 8.4 million. The program is developed by renowned Berlin entrepreneurship school, The DO School, with the support of the Westerwelle Foundation.
The DO School method consists in a learning-by-doing approach, collectively responding to a common challenge as a team, while in parallel working individually in each Fellow’s venture idea. For this class of Fellows, the challenge consists of developing apprenticeship programs for low-income peripheral communities, in order to bridge the education-to-employment gap. It is a co-creative process developed jointly through this methodology and SINAL’s educational philosophy of the “living laboratory,” which in the course of 5 years has enabled change agents from around the world to prototype and scale cost effective solutions for the transition to a sustainable future, in the highly diverse yet endangered Atlantic Rainforest and the low income community of Santo Antonio, a neighborhood of Xerem, where the campus is located.
Throughout the following weeks, these young entrepreneurs will take class with different speakers with a vast experience in social impact entrepreneurship, organizational identity and branding, financing and fundraising, and communications, having the opportunity to relate on a personal basis and consult on their individual ventures. At the same time, they will test and prototype the solution to the challenge within the context of the surrounding areas of SINAL.
The Sinal do Vale campus is a certified Global Ecosphere Retreat located just at the border of the urban sprawl of Rio de Janeiro, plagued by youth unemployment, precarious infrastructure and sanitation; and inside a protected area of the Atlantic Rainforest, of which only 12% of the original expansion is left. Therefore, the Fellows will have the unique opportunity to get the inspiration and experience on how to address low-cost solutions that can be socially and environmentally sustainable, as well as scalable to the Guanabara Bay area and other impoverished communities in Latin America and the world.
Links of interest:
http://thedoschool.org/blog/challenges/the-apprenticeship-challenge/