Event: World Leisure Organization Field School August 24th until 1 September 2018.
This was a one week project organized by the World Leisure Organization that combines a field work experience with the international congress that happens every two years.
2018 was the turn of Brazil and the field school happened in the outskirts of the large city São Paulo, called Perus. Perus is a poor community that suffers from lack of governemental attention, black youth genocity and threat of indigeouns displacement. Despite of that, there is a creative group working together to resist and to transform the community into a safer and productive área. We stay with local families and we learn more about community entrepreneuship.
A wonderful and welcoming community showed us their heritage and surroundings in four days of work. The visits were coordinated by Quilombaque, a local NGOfomenting local development through art, history and culture. They develop and implement local business using collective/collaborative practices to engage the community. They bring african roots such as dance, circle practices, drums as a methaphor to connect, bound and work together.
In total more than 25 students from all over the world (South Africa, New Zealand, Mexico, Canada, China, Romania, Brazil, Spain and the Netherlands) were there to work with the locals and develop a project that would be presented at the end of the week during the World Leisure Congress of 2018.
By seeing their background, surroundings and by talking to the community members, the students could figure out what Perus wanted for the future.
The students were divided into groups to came up with some ideas related to leisure and tourismThe four days that we stayed in Perus we were in homestays, as the local families are also part of the community-based tourism they are developing, being trained to receive visitors in their own homes.
Click here to see some pictures