A comforting feeling is that of accomplishment at the end of each completed project. And it is with this feeling that we end another cycle in the community of Barão de Cocais, in Minas Gerais. In this area, we carried out the Territorial Development and Social Transformation project for two years.
Promoted by Vale, the project covered the communities of the Self-Rescue Zone (ZAS), which includes the municipalities of Socorro, Piteira, Tabuleiro, and Vila do Gongo. It was an incredible and inspiring journey, which began in September 2021 with the first phase lasting around a year, and which aimed to strengthen female entrepreneurship and gender equality through the creative economy.
Another interest was to strengthen the Socorro, Tabuleiro, and Piteiras Community Association, for the participatory construction of activities and to develop participatory rural planning. For this reason, actions were developed to inspire and train entrepreneurs with the incubation of selected businesses, as well as collective initiatives.
“In this process, we had the stages of formation, and inspiration, we worked a lot on the issues of business management, digital communication, and how to put the product on the market. Also with the incubation process and the application of seed capital, we helped structure these businesses from the point of view of acquiring equipment and other services.”, says Jussara Rocha, a partner at Raízes and the coordinator of this project.
The training and advisory stage enabled the exchange of knowledge between Raízes consultants and the beneficiaries, based on the provision of relevant content. These actions took place in hybrid form, some online and others face-to-face. In 2023, we continued to support the businesses from the previous year and launched a new call for proposals for seven more small women-led businesses.
Second phase: Social Transformation
The second phase of the project took place entirely in person. The aim was to continue the work carried out in the first phase, with actions to strengthen female entrepreneurship and the Community Association. We held collective training meetings and individual consultancy sessions that expanded on the themes related to business structuring. Among them, are entrepreneurial attitudes, business modeling and analysis, financial management, costs, pricing and productivity, and marketing.
“The big gain from this project was emotional, and personal gains, in how these women deal with things, making better decisions, understanding the business better, its correlation with their lives, and, with that, having more certainty. So bringing this clarity to them was really great,” said Maria Cavalcanti, project manager for Raízes.
Active listening was extremely important in carrying out this project. It generated reality and qualitative data that guided more assertive social investment work, as well as gave us guidance on the social reality of this community.
The beneficiaries’ perspectives shed light on what they needed. And while working on this project we realized that they ended up improving their self-esteem, their quality of life, as well as their appreciation of their families and the community.
As they say, “that’s priceless”.
Even from a little further away now, we look forward to following the success and impact of this initiative on the lives of these entrepreneurs.
