The following proposal was submitted in Portuguese to request funding for a large space to be built on land donated to the project by the local government and the project has two years to break ground on the land in order to build their Atelier.

Organization: Instituto de Ecocidadania Juriti
Juazeiro do Norte - Ceará

Juriti Institute of Eco-citizenship promotes sustainable development to recover citizenship and preserve the environment. It acts in the area of environmental education, culture, professional and teacher training, art, employment assistance and income generation. The 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.


Global Giving's support will permit psychosocial aid and crafts workshops for around 75 young women and their families. These workshops will revitalize the local production of traditional cloth dolls and generate professional skills and income in a short time.

Case Statement for Demographic Served:

The geographic area of Brazil where this project is located is one of the most impoverished areas of Brazil. Located in the Northeast of Brazil, an area where a good many people migrate from to larger city’s in the hope of finding employment. These people whether in their home town or in another city mostly work in the informal job sector in jobs such as maids, day laborers etc. They work on the fringe 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 a 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 most undesirable locations like along side of rail road tracks.

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 divulging 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 this 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. All of the women were teenage mothers and their children have all had run-ins with the law.

There is a continuing problem of drug trafficking in the community between rival factions and the traffickers recruit children as young as 8 years old into the factions into low-level positions such as lookouts and runners. The project has made it clear to us that they are losing many children to violent deaths due to their involvement with drug traffickers. Children become involved in the trafficking for the simple reason that they are hungry and without resources.

Information about the Solicited Donation

1.  Donation solicited from Global Giving

2.  The donation will be used for:

a.  To build a women’s cooperative workshop center, and to consolidate the work of 3 projects currently working in different locations and to expand the project from it’s current capacity of 75 to 150;

b.  To create an opportunity for professional qualification and management of income for 75 women, mothers, heads-of-household, mothers of adolescents on probation, continuing the work of the GAF (Family Support Group with a focus on the Solidarity Studio);

c.  To realize the goals of a true cooperative and share resources for the generation of income;

d.  Providing a salary for 75 of the women today (and more as the project expands), as an alternative income, so they can work full-time at the Solidarity Studio

e.  Improve the offerings of the Solidarity Studio.

3.  Budget: USD$58,600

The idea for the Workshop Center (Atelier Solidario) is to expand the experience as well as to concentrate in one space a nucleus of our groups that are currently spread around in different locations and cannot easily share resources and information and making it difficult to monitor their activities.

Operations of the Workshop Center:

1-Reception area

1-Warehouse Store for the selling of products made through the projects

3- Rooms for the workshops

1-Stock room

1-Kitchenette

1- Administrative Office

Through the realization of the Workshop Center we can double the number of women participants whose combined participants from the projects three income generating groups currently total 75 women increasing the number to 150 women. The project will carry out workshops in artesanal handicrafts and design in handicrafts and also include a school of Economic Solidarity with an economics course in partnership with the Regional University of Caririi.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM

1.)  Describe the themes, problems or specific needs of your group.

The city of Juazeiro do Norte in the state of Ceará has approximately 212,133 inhabitants, with an area of 248.56 km2, resulting in a population density of 853.45 inhabitants/km2. This is a very dense population for a city in the interior, causing serious urban infrastructure problems that run from lack of basic sanitation to high levels of violence.

Juazeiro do Norte is becoming a center for artisans in the state of Ceará, with a large vocation for the production of souvenirs and mementos. One of these mementos is the little rag doll or “boneca de pano,” whose primary materials are cloth scraps, corncobs, thread, needles, cotton wadding, and a lot of imagination. However, these traditional dolls are becoming scarcer, due to a lack of incentive for their production, which could generate jobs and income for many women of the city. Another reason for the increasing scarcity of the dolls is the diminishing tradition of doll-makers passing their skills onto their daughters and granddaughters.

We do not know the origins of the “boneca de pano” we only know that they appeared in every society, even the most remote. The popular cloth doll was a basic part of the intellectual development and motor coordination of the child. Characterized as an artesanal product- the “boneca de pano” acts as an interactive form in the fantasy world of children. The doll was a close representation of the social reality in which they lived; it was very common for little girls to make replicas of their homes with furniture, using the dolls to represent their selves.

With the advent of the industrial revolution these “bonecas de pano” underwent great changes. The demand for artisans diminished and society went on to purchase plastic dolls, of new shapes and with clothes that no longer represented the social reality of the many children predominantly from the middle and lower classes. But, in spite of these technological advances the rag doll continues with its cultural identity that enchants children from all generations and social classes, rich and poor. The doll is also a work of art, decorating living rooms and composing tableaus. The lack of traditional doll-makers to pass down this craft has created a scarcity of these precious handicrafts making them difficult to come by in the popular artisan stores and craft fairs in the regions of CRAJUBAR-Crato, Juazeiro e Barbalha. Now grandmothers, the doll-makers complain of eye problems and backaches as they struggle to keep this craft alive and deal with the difficulty of getting raw supplies to create the dolls.

Confronting this reality, the Instituto de Ecocidadania de Juriti through their nuclei of art education and human rights have developed the experience of rescuing the traditional culture of the “boneca de pano”, as with the project that includes 25 female heads of household. Mothers of delinquent adolescents who are learning this alternative trade as a way to generate income through skills learning and also benefiting the local economy while creating a solidarity with the consumer.

2.) Explain why working with these issues is vital for the promotion of women’s rights and describe the context (social, cultural and political) of these specific issues in the community or region.

This project also aids in rescuing the magic of childhood that in the case of these women was lost. Their childhood stories, which are so common, are slowly being revealed: having little time to play because they had to help their mothers from a young age. When they could find the time to play, they had to invent toys because they rarely if ever received a toy or present for that matter.

The rag dolls are a part of their lives and this happy childhood memory is constantly evoked by the facilitators of the group as they discuss questions of gender and human rights.

Alongside this experience these women are beginning to take an interest in the history of their own communities. They are seeking out their older neighbor ladies with knowledge of the doll-making craft. Generally these women doll-makers are older than 60 and losing their vision and are now fragile due to back problems; they feel a great sadness that they can not pass on this traditional art form to their children and grandchildren. Even so, they continue making dolls and selling at a price of a dozen for 20BR (USD10) that they produce and sell every two weeks to the storekeepers of the central market of Juazeiro do Norte.

The secondary benefits of this doll project are numerous, such as: environmental benefits (recycling cloth that would normally go to waste), social benefits (possibility of income generation and the additional knowledge of human rights that they learn as part of the project), gender benefits (from the rag doll work, comes the construction of knowledge on the condition of women in the male-dominated society of northeastern Brasil), aesthetic benefits (they are perfecting the finished product of the dolls, improving their own sense of beauty) and ethical benefits (they are understanding the meaning of solidarity in artistic production).

The creation of the dolls, using these female heads of household’s childhood images of toys as a reference, provides more than just the intended result: the finished doll represents a chance for them to rethink their role in the household and in society. For sure, the beautiful dolls are beginning to appear in their hearts with all the lightness of their lost childhoods.

The project intends to offer a salary for the women, so that they can continue producing the dolls without causing a financial sacrifice to their families, and continue improving their knowledge and skills in creating and customizing the dolls.

Testimonials from three project participants:

Maria de Jesus: When I joined this group I had stopped believing in anything. Then I started to understand that I needed to work in order not to depend on the change that the people on my street would give me. I don’t deny it, I was living off people’s change to feed my four children. I had no income at all. Now I have learned a profession, I know how to make “bonecas de pano” and other crafts and with my sales I earn R$ 170.00 a month. It’s still very little, but with the construction of our loft we will be able to increase the size of our group and certainly our production and our income will increase.

Francisca Lima: Here at the project we learn that we are the ones who change our lives. In addition to learning the craft, I also learned to work with money and so I started wanting to study. I returned to school and now I am organizing a group of women to study about fair trade, this story of economic solidarity. We are discovering that we can earn money without exploiting people. We take our portion and the rest we use to buy material to make our products. Before I had no income, and today I earn about R$150.00 a month.

Socorro Viana: I am one of the oldest women in the project. I joined in 2004. I began without knowing anything, but I dedicated myself to making dolls. My dolls were very ugly, because I didn’t have the patience to do all the work properly. Then we got the idea to learn finishing techniques. At the beginning I couldn’t sell any of my dolls, but then I started to make them properly and sell a lot of them. Now I’ve opened a little store in my house and I earn R$200.00 a month. With this money I can feed my 6 children.