Favela da Paz in Brazil
Favela da Paz, led by Claudio Miranda, is a project situated in Jardim Ângela, one of the favelas (slums) of São Paulo, Brazil, which the UN declared in the 1990s to be one of the most brutal neighborhoods of the world. They’re a cultural project providing education in music, media production, self-sufficiency and more, and aiming to turn their neighborhood into an urban model for sustainability and nonviolence.
More than twenty years ago, Claudio Miranda began to gather friends to make music with tin cans, as they couldn’t get real instruments. At a time of daily shootings in the neighborhood, creativity was the alternative to violence and fear he found, something that allowed him to stay with hope and serve empathy. Claudio started the successful band Poesia Samba Soul, and runs a cultural project which offers hundreds of young people the chance to learn musical instruments and to get to know a life beyond drugs and violence, building community and serving ethical values.
Today, Favela da Paz is an umbrella of transformational projects under the frame of art and culture, sports, sustainability, entrepreneurship and social equity, involving youth and the surrounding community, creating the possibility to thrive in the slums.
Urban Sustainability
When Claudio first visited Tamera in 2009, he had seen a vision of transforming his neighborhood into a “Favela Da Paz” (“slum of peace”), an example for urban sustainability where local people produce food and energy and coexist in communities of solidarity. Inspired by this vision, his community in Brazil has taken an active part in the Global Campus, participating in many of our educational programs and exchanges, learning and implementing many of the teachings in their neighborhood. Today, they’re a role model and make headlines nationally with their work on:
- urban permaculture
- renewable energy solutions (e.g. solar and biogas)
- building community
- reconciliation work in a crisis situation
- peace music.
Show solidarity with peaceworkers worldwide!
Your contribution will enable students from less privileged backgrounds to study at Tamera.
Watch a video by CGTN America about the project
(2023, Portuguese with English subtitles):
Watch Poesia Samba Soul perform “Samba Solar,”
a song about solar energy (2013):
Watch a short clip about their 2011 celebration of Global Grace Day,
singing a song Claudio composed for and while being at the Colombian Peace Community of San José de Apartadó: