INTERCULTURAL

LEADERS

Intercultural Innovation Award (IIA)

Vaga Lume is a NGO founded in 2001, and it is a recipient of the Intercultural Innovation Award 4th UNAOC Global Forum. The organization develops multiple actions for the promotion of education and culture in 149 rural communities in the Brazilian Legal Amazon and in Sao Paulo, where it is headquartered. Vaga Lume has the purpose to empower people and communities from the Amazon by promoting reading and management of community libraries as a space to share knowledge. To accomplish such a challenging mission, the organization has been promoting access to book and to reading in the Amazon through the Expedition Program; and fostering the intercultural dialogue among teenagers from the Amazon and São Paulo through the Net Program. The Net Program is an ‘Education for Sustainable Development’ in which teenagers discuss their identity and local environment, write letters and produce crafts that are exchanged between pairs of institutions and, finally, meet at a camp. The idea is to foster respect for cultural diversity by building cross-cultural understanding while stimulating competencies like empathy, critical thinking, decision-making and leadership. Thanks to the support received by UNAOC and the BMW Group, Vaga Lume and Kehila Democratic School are now completing the pilot of the International Net Program - and benefiting 71 teenagers. The idea was born during the Intercultural Innovation Award Alumni Meeting held in Berlin, Germany (2015) and has been going on since 2016. The intercultural dialogue originally promoted by Vaga Lume is now being internationally replicated: teenagers from São Braz (Amazon/Brazil) and from Kehila Democratic School (Tel Aviv/Israel) are engaged in an innovative methodological approach that guide them into thinking global and acting local, so as to produce meaningful learning that impact their perceptions in relation to the value of cultural diversity and to the need for a sustainable development.