The story of Kolibri - Children at Risk Foundation
Gregory J. Smith sold his house and everything he ownd, and moved from Bergen in Norway to São Paulo in Brazil in 1993. Gregory decided to use his life to work with and help brazilian street kids.
Kolibri Brasil was established by Gregory J. Smith in São Paulo, in 1993. Gregory had already established The Children At Risk Foundation – Norway in 1992, determined to benefit the street children of Brazil by defending their rights and offering them a dignified and definitive solution so that they could live and grow within a family-oriented context and healthy social environment.
Helping streetkids
In the initial years, Gregory gained valuable practical experience by living with the children on the streets and motivating them to leave such a negative and self-destructive environment, offering them an alternative home and lifestyle on a smallholding in the urban periphery of Diadema in São Paulo.
During the last decade, the experience gained guided the organisation to create its Street Migration Prevention Programme to prevent vulnerable children and young people at risk from running away from their homes to live on the streets, developing this together with at-risk community children and abandoned street children in the process of leaving the streets. The essence of the work lies in the interest taken in and the knowledge of the personal situation of each child or young person, from the very first moment he or she becomes involved with our organisation.
Activity centres
Due to the success of this programme, CARF was forced to seek new solutions to cope with growing demands and in 2001 the Hummingbird Arts & Cultural Activity Centre became a reality. This allowed the organisation to expand its capacity from 80 children and young people to more than 600 attended in 2004. Due to our partnership with local municipal schools in 2007 the number of children attended by our programme topped a 1.000. This year (2008) the organisation will be reaching out to neighbouring communities with the implementation of smaller nuclei to attend the needs of more children in underprivileged favela communities.
Dignified life
Kolibri’s Street Migration Prevention Program is aimed at helping former street children and other at-risk community children in São Paulo, creating pathways of opportunity and a more dignified life. Most of our target population come from one of the most deprived and violent areas in the entire state of São Paulo, in situations of extreme poverty and social vulnerability. Many have special needs and require closer attention due to their unstructured family situation, which in some cases causes total neglect.
In addition, the centre supports the demands of our rehabilitation programme, serving the needs of already rescued street children or those coming off the streets.
Decision-making skills
The programmes of Kolibri Activity Centre are primarily preventive in nature and promote the confidence, character, competence, and "connectedness" of that population to their family, peers, and community. They provide a range of support and services in such areas as vocational training, health education, recreation, cultural understanding - tolerance and expansion, racial reconciliation, artistic expression, environmental awareness, and the development of youth leadership involving conflict resolution and decision-making skills.
The main Programmes carried out at present at the Kolibri Activity Centre can be divided into three main groups:
Sporting Activities:
These promote corporal skills, spacial and bodily awareness, integration, team work, concentration, discipline and help cultivate a competitive spirit, all concepts that are essential for social interaction, living together and personal health care.
Artistic and Cultural Development:
These cater for the cultural, artistic and aesthetic qualities of life with an emphasis on development of the creative potential, awakening skills and talents that, when used with free expression, can become useful instruments of self-development, communication and training.
Vocational Training:
These allow training through constructive and interactive work, awakening vocations and talents through guidance and access to specialist spheres, dynamics and techniques as well as encouraging the use of professional equipment and material.
The stated aim of the Hummingbird Street Migration Prevention Programme, to work for social inclusion without discrimination and its recognised competence in carrying out projects, is the distinguishing feature of our work on social intervention. Through the serious commitment and dedication with which we carry out our work, and the good results we have had in cooperative projects with other agencies, the partnerships and dialogues with CARF as an external agent for cooperative ventures has grown and strengthened.
We realise that unfortunately we do not have the capacity to help all those who come to us. We regret this even more when we converse with these children and see their eagerness, hope and need to take part in our programme, to dedicate their time to constructive activity and to find a different direction from that of self-destruction taken by so many others before.
Limitations and challenges
All we can do is to take on as much as possible in order to transform in a positive way the lives of these children and young people. We know that we have succeeded and this gives us the strength to carry on with our work despite the limitations and challenges that occur every day.
Our VISION is to become a referential solution, not only for street children, but also for any other child at risk in Brazil or elsewhere in the world, but to do that we also depend on your help.
