Who we are
Recanto Esperança is a CSO – Civil Society Organization – founded in September 2004, with the desire to contribute to various actions within the Icaraí community, in the Uberaba neighborhood, composed of 700 families marked by social vulnerability and precarious health; with a high number of children and adolescents in situations of poverty, school dropout and child labor.
Our mission
Promote the whole development of people and families for the transformation of society.
Our vision
To be a reference in the appreciation and integral training of people with sustainability.
Our values
Ethics, because character matters! Kindness generates kindness and softens life. Harbor: everyone needs a safe haven. Professionalism: competence and heart in the mission. Cooperation, because together we are better and stronger! Education transforms people who transform the world. Diversity because varying is important to ward off boredom. Health Care: to take care of the other you need to be well.
Our story
Our story begins with a Swiss couple, Thomas and Erika and their 3 children, then 8 months, 3 years and 5 years old, who left Switzerland to dedicate themselves to social work in Brazil in 1994. In Lajeado RS
they worked in an orphanage for 13 months. After a brief stay in Switzerland for visa issues, they arrived in Curitiba in 1996 where they joined an institution that shelters children and adolescents removed from their homes due to different situations of social risk. There, Thomas did maintenance and accompanied the teenagers in the practice of sports and recreational activities. Erika was ready to teach the girls her specialty: making cookies according to a special recipe. Both activities provided many conversations with children and adolescents.
Realizing how the family was lacking in the lives of children, that despite the extreme poverty that generated social risk they preferred to return to scarcity at home rather than stay at the institution, their hearts moved to preventive social work.
In 2004, with the permanence visas in hand, they found the Jardim Icaraí community. A needy community without the minimum infrastructure (basic sanitation, electricity, without public lighting, so on) and without any social project. There they saw the opportunity to put into practice actions that could strengthen the family and avoid the institutionalization of children as much as possible. In September that year, Recanto Esperança was legally founded, and since then it has offered a space with a safe environment for children and teenagers between 6 and 17 years old, with activities planned to enhance their intellectual, personal, social and spiritual development.
