The Olympian Giving Kids From Brazil’s Favelas A Fighting Chance

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

I started judo when I was about to turn 14 years old. Seven years later, I competed in my first Olympic Games for Brazil. My highlights included winning seven Pan American Judo Championships, an Olympic bronze in Athens in 2004, and being world number one from 2006 to 2007.

It was during these years that I began to see the invisible walls that they have in Rio de Janeiro. I started teaching judo in Rocinha, one of the largest favelas in Latin America. A few years later, I got together with a group of friends and founded the Instituto Reação, to help children living in the favelas to connect through sports and education and obtain, as we say, black belts on and off the mat. .

It was moving to see that what we were doing was having a bigger impact than I expected. I hadn’t realized how important sport could be in changing lives. We didn’t talk much about soft skills back then, but you can develop a lot of them by doing sports. We lost one of our students, 16 years old, who was murdered; he was buried with a T-shirt from our institution. At that moment, I realized that we were doing something really powerful.

This year we celebrate the 20th anniversary of our foundation, the Instituto Reação, of which I am director. All board members are volunteers and we have 120 employees working in 13 favelas in five states of Brazil. We have had about 20,000 students.

Because we grew so large, I suddenly had to manage a much larger team of 100+ employees and around 4,000 students.

The idea is to help these kids believe they can be whoever they want to be: we’ve had lawyers, doctors, engineers, and Olympic champions in our programs.

Because we grew so large, I suddenly had to manage a much larger team of 100+ employees and around 4,000 students. I felt it was time to go back to the classroom, inspired by my friends on the board.

I chose the one from Brazil Dom Cabral Foundation and I have taken three programs that have helped me in many ways: advanced management, in association with Instead; transformational leadership; and board development.

The advanced management program was the one I liked the most. I was with about 30 CEOs, some of them from very large companies in Brazil. Because part of the course took place at Insead in France, the group bonded closely. When it was over, we all visited the company of each participant, they also came here to our institution, which was very valuable to me.

All the programs that we execute in Reação have the same momentum that a company would have, in terms of impact measurement. The program helped me develop skills such as understanding culture and people, and storytelling behind a company’s strategy.

It was not a long program: with classes, it lasted about a month and a half. We also had many books to read and study. I can’t spend a lot of time abroad as my life here is extremely busy so I prefer to do the courses where you have intense study for a couple of weeks.

One of the main takeaways for me has been the importance of building the right team. Before going to the courses, I was eager to be good at every part of the organization. The courses helped me understand each part a little better, from marketing to finance. But they also helped me understand what it takes to select the right people for each job.

I also developed a better awareness of my best and worst characteristics as a leader and can understand what kind of people I need most on my team to complement my flaws.

One of the main problems begins at school. Poor kids don’t know rich kids, and vice versa

Our institution needs around R$10mn ($1.98mn) each year, so we are used to asking for money. The best achievement of the courses was to develop another fundraising mechanism. Now we also have a start-up, Cicclo, which offers private after-school classes in sports, but also in other fields such as robotics, English and Spanish. We not only raise funds in this way for the institution, but we also take children from the favelas and children from the extracurricular courses, which are from some of the most expensive schools in Brazil, and we create teams so that they can play soccer together. .

One of the great problems of my country begins at school. Poor kids don’t know rich kids, and vice versa. When kids from expensive schools talk about doing something good for favela kids, it’s about donating old toys or phones, and they grow up seeing the poor as inferior to them. When you play sports and put them on the same team, you get them to have a different perspective on the differences they have.

The goal is for the Cicclo startup to grow so large that it can fully fund the institution and hopefully others.