Beyond eating and sleeping”: association creates a campaign to build a reading space in the suburbs of Fortaleza-CE

Credit: Press release

By: Renato Silva – Lupa do Bem / Favela em Pauta

To promote dreams and new realities, the CDVHS – Centro de Defesa da Vida Herbert de Souza and the DLIS Network have created Vivo Cidadania, which will build three reading spaces for adolescents in the region of Gran Bom Jardim – a peripheral area of Fortaleza that includes five neighborhoods of the Ceará capital. 

Created in response to the serious statistics of murdered adolescents in the state of Ceará, especially in the periphery, the Vivo Cidadania project aims to promote various actions to involve young people in the communities of Gran Bom Jardim] and thus build other life perspectives for these adolescents.

According to data from the Adolescent Homicide Prevention Committee of Ceará, in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, 4,039 homicides were recorded, of which 16% were of boys and girls between 10 and 19 years of age. This figure represents the loss of life of twelve adolescents per week during the year, which exposes the vulnerability of this age group.

It is in this scenario that the CDVHS and the DLIS Network – an articulation of dozens of civil society entities operating in the Greater Bom Jardim region – have been carrying out actions with young people and adolescents with the aim of offering various activities that can integrate them into the city.

The organisations call these activities the Vivo Cidadania Project, where they actively seek out young people interested in the activities. The list includes weekly didactic meetings for training in various topics, ranging from human rights and violation of rights to the construction of identities, the formation of bonds and life project. In addition to these integration opportunities, there are also external activities to take the young people to visit cultural and artistic facilities and learn more about access to the city.

In this process of creating an initiative in the organisation of the CDVHS, the educator and coordinator of the Vivo Cidadania Project, Joice Luz, spoke of the need for civil society to act in the prevention of violence for young people of this age. 

“Faced with this problem, we thought of a project that would have as its main objective the construction of possibilities, methodologies, prevention narratives, intervention and also monitoring of this public policy. The project works directly with adolescents between fourteen and nineteen years of age, giving priority to this stage.” 

The project, which also offers workshops on professionalisation, entrepreneurship and solidarity economy, now draws attention to activities related to reading. To this end, the “Planting Ideas” campaign is underway, which focuses on in-person donations of children’s books, or even direct donations to the organisation through Pix. 

More than carrying out practical actions, the project coordinator said that fostering the possibility of dreaming of these young people is the main objective, while recalling with emotion the speech of young Kauan* who said: “we just want to eat and sleep, aunt”, and then added Joice Luz “it is beyond eating and sleeping, isn’t it? It is to have many perspectives, other processes, other realities, where they can be what they want, where they can dream, where they can fly”, she added.

How to follow and support the Live Citizenship Project

To follow the launch of the reading rooms, other actions of the project in the monitoring and discussion of public policies on safety and access to the city, the other activities implemented by the Live Citizenship Project, in addition to all the articulation of the DLIS Network and the CDVHS, you can follow the profile of the network on instagram, information for the donation of books in person and through pixels can be found by clicking here.  

* A fictitious name was attributed to protect the identity of the young man, author of the phrase.