Box 3: Building social capital through the school environment in Rio de Janeiro50

Alexandre de Gusmao Municipal School is located in the Acari neighbourhood, a low-income area housing 40,000 people with an average life expectancy of 56-58 years. Approximately 50% of these houses are shanties and border the extremely polluted Acari River. Drug trafficking is the most attractive income-generating alternative for youngsters. This discouraging environment reinforces negative messages to the children and adolescents of Acari. As part of the Health-Promoting Schools initiative led by the Secretary of Health in Rio de Janeiro, the Acari Alexandre de Gusmao’s health promotion project was established. It applies a popular education approach, where the school is the centre of social action and education. The project use reading as a way to promote communication and critical-thinking skills, two important health- and life-related competencies. The school initiated a Home Reading Project, which developed into a small network composed of other schools, churches, and a community strategy involving teachers and voluntary parents in teaching reading. The project lends books, organizes reading gatherings, and visits to museums and libraries. The project also used music to engage children in workshops and after-school classes. The Popular Opera Centre of Acari was created to introduce experiences that most children in the community had seen before only on television; to be trained as singers, dancers, and in other performing-arts-related professions. The school decided to include people of all ages in the initiative, and soon approximately 500 people joined a wide spectrum of activities and workshops including classic ballet, guitar, singing, percussion, music history, and drama. Recognizing that self-esteem, self-efficacy, participation and self-determination contribute to healthy development and well-being, the design and delivery of these activities are seen as making a major contribution to health promotion and countering many of the negative social factors in the community. Source: Meresman, 2008.