Summer 2002 Research Report Joseph Sutton "Grassroots Community Development in Candeal Pequeno, Brazil"

I traveled to Salvador, Bahia for two weeks this summer to gain a better understanding of a grassroots non governmental organization (NGO) in a historically marginalized urban community, Candeal Pequeno, Salvador, Brazil, and its various attempts at improving the quality of life of community residents. The intent of my research project was to investigate why this NGO-led community development project has apparently been successful, focusing on three components: the role of the NGO (Pracatum), citizen participation, and investment from private industry, international agencies and local government. The Associação Pracatum Ação Social (Pracatum) NGO was founded in 2000 in the Candeal Pequeno neighborhood of Salvador as a result of community organizing led by Carlinhos Brown, a prominent Brazilian musician born in Candeal. From its inception, Pracatum has attempted a broad-range community development scheme based on the collectively identified needs and desires of community residents. In addition to improvements in the community’s infrastructure, Pracatum has established a School of Music and Technology (PSMT) that offers professional music training and technology courses to students from the community concurrently enrolled in local schools.

My research this summer began at the UFBA (Universiade Federal da Bahia), where I collected secondary materials related to the increasing role NGOs play under Neoliberalism. I then met with my main contact at Pracatum, Executive Director, Caius Brandão, and with his help arranged in-depth interviews with various employees and voltunteers at the NGO and collected valuable documents detailing the history of the NGO in Candeal Pequeno and their pedagogical approach. With the help of the director of Pracatum’s ‘Ta Rebocado (roughly, “It’s Plastered”) division, Patricia Marchisini, I arranged meetings with community members in order to explore the neighborhood on foot and to conduct informal interviews. In all, I consider my research this summer successful as it shed light on my most pressing research questions and laid the groundwork for future research in the same community by building a strong rapport.

Since my overarching research goal was to gauge the success of the community development program in Candeal Pequeno I was quite excited to simply see the tangible improvements to life in the community. Although I had previously been told about the myriad gains in the quality of life in Candeal Pequeno, I was surprised to see what was once considered a favela (shantytown) looking more like a working class neighborhood. Like many favelas in Brazil, much of Candeal Pequeno is situated on steep hillsides--on the slopes of the Horta Florestal in Salvador’s Candeal de Brotas neighborhood. The larger district of Nossa Senhora de Brotas is mainly comprised of working class and lower income neighborhoods, and is one of the areas peripheral to the old city of Salvador that was first inhabited by freed slaves at the end of the 19th century. Unfortunately the poverty that was pervasive at the time of the district’s founding persists today. However, once you descend the narrow and steep streets that lead into Candeal Pequeno a different picture emerges, one of a community that has significantly altered their living conditions in the last few years.

The most visible aspect of the community development program in Candeal Pequeno is the improvement of infrastructure. Photos from the early 1990s and before that I had access to at Pracatum’s offices show narrow and steep streets of mud and dirt that often succumbed to mud slides; houses made of unstable materials that rested precariously on hillsides that were in danger of collapsing or washing away during the rainy season; lack of legal and safe connections to the city electricity grid; limited reach of sewage and water systems; and an increasing population of squatters on the edge of the neighborhood. Now, much of these infrastructure problems have been resolved through a combination of community organizing led by Pracatum and funding from state and national government and international agencies.

Without a doubt, the NGO, Pracatum, has been integral in the community development process in Candeal. Without the leadership and vision of Pracatum the infrastructure projects and professional music school would not be a reality today. In one sense, the community development program underway in Candeal is an anomaly because without the support, funding and vision of the NGO’s famous founder, Carlinhos Brown, the program would have not likely been developed and carried out as successfully as it has been up to this point. As a charismatic and nationally known personality, Brown has successfully motivated community members to capitalize on their strong sense of cultural and ethnic identity through the arts. Although Brown doesn’t currently play a role in the day to day management of the NGO, the staff of Pracatum is professional and takes their role very seriously and believes that the process underway in Candeal Pequeno has the potential to serve as a model for other marginalized communities. In fact at the time of my research, a government agency (CONDER) was set to begin a documentation process of Pracatum’s pedagogical approach to community organizing that could be applied to other communities.

Community organizing has played a role equaled to that of the NGO in the community development process in Candeal Pequeno. Previous research I had conducted on community development had found a higher degree of apathy among community members in another city in northeastern Brazil, which limited community leaders’ ability to mobilize people around common goals and generate collective action. Why was Candeal Pequeno any different? Perhaps the single most important factor in explaining why communities leaders in Candeal Pequeno were more successful in their organizing efforts was the strong sense of community that bound residents together. Ties of ethnicity and family were the two strongest links I found joining community members together. The overwhelmingly majority of residents are Afro-Brazilian and with this comes shared cultural traditions in the form of music, food and religion. In addition to strong cultural bonds in the community that contribute to collective action, familial bonds also play a role in creating a fairly tight knit community. A staff member of Pracatum’s ‘Ta Rebocado division explained to me that there was a older woman in the community that counted nearly three hundred combined children and grandchildren, and while this example was extreme, family connections in the community undoubtedly run deep.

My third research goal was to examine the role that financiers played in the development process in Candeal Pequeno. In particular I was interested in the Lei de Cultura passed a few years ago by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. The law essentially allows corporations to take take tax reductions when they make financial donations to organizations working in the arts. Before my fieldwork began I knew that Pracatum had partnered with the state-owned Petrobras under this new law for 2001 and had received close to 500,000 Reis or $225,000 US for the Pracatum School of Music and technology. Unfortunately, as the interviews I conducted revealed, Pracatum has been unable to sustain this relationship with Petrobras due to a loss of a strategic contact at the oil giant.

With most of the infrastructure programs completed in Candeal Pequeno, Pracatum’s funding needs now apply to the school. Currently the Brazilian Ministry of Education is supplying the largest portion of this funding. The Ministry of Education is providing Pracatum with 3 million Reis to construct a larger building for its school, which will allow the enrollment of the school to double. However, the leadership of Pracatum is interested in the NGO becoming more self sufficient in the area of funding. The executive director of Pracatum sees the expansion of the school as a way to allow students from outside the community to train as profession musicians and a way to subsidize the operation of the school and scholarships for students of more modest means.

My research experience this summer was rewarding and helped illustrate the ways in which grassroots development schemes can be successful. Although I do not think this research project will be the core component of my thesis project, I do think it will play a supporting role in demonstrating the way in which NGOs are increasingly being called upon to provide the social welfare net that was once provided by the state under the Import Substitute Industrialization (ISI) model and has been largely absent under the economic model of Neoliberalism. I am truly thankful for the genorosity of the Tinker Foundation that made my travel this summer possible.