Time to roll up the sleeves...

On Monday all 4 groups met together with our respective clients at Nós Coworking, a creative space for small groups and entrepreneurs to share office infrastructure and creative thinking. Nós is also one of the 4 clients for #teamGuaiba.

My project is on the Junior Achievement Brazil Team. I'm working with Annette Bazin (@annettebazin) from Vancouver and Darren Louie (@darrenlouie) from Palo Also, both highly energetic and effective team members. The picture here shows up with Daniel Fernandes, the Executive Director of JA Porto Alegre and our client. 

For those not familiar with JA, it is the world's largest organization dedicated to educating students in grades K-12 about entrepreneurship, work readiness and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs.The programs help prepare young people for the real world by showing them how to generate wealth and effectively manage it, how to create jobs which make their communities more robust, and how to apply entrepreneurial thinking to the workplace. 

Students put these lessons into action and learn the value of contributing to their communities. Here is a picture of some of the projects and products created by the JA Brazil student participants.

Our work scope is to "develop a volunteer recruitment strategy, coupled with an effective automated database platform system that will secure in matching volunteers interested in embracing JA programs and its teaching methodology on a more sustainable basis with schools and other learning institutions".

There is an interesting difference in culture in Brazil as far as volunteerism is concerned. It is much harder to recruit and retain volunteers where people are working long hours and are trying to establish a better standard of living for their families. Still there are many people willing to help out, so the JA group wants to better understand the motivations of those who do step up. They also want better tools for scheduling and management as it is a difficult challenge here, especially with the public schools that often have strikes impacting schedules for the kids and the time the volunteers have allocated to come and teach in the classroom. We will be going from a prehistoric paper based system to some modern cloud based tools, so this will have positive impact on JA Porto Alegre, even if, in our limited time here, we cannot fully implement a solution.