It offers educational and professional training opportunities

The Game Change Project is part of the public policies of the Government of the State of Ceará for adolescents, by offering social, cultural, sports and professional qualification activities, in addition to encouraging the return to school of those who have left the classroom for disinterest or reluctance. This project also encourages actions to strengthen family and community ties.

The project is part of the Overcoming Program, which aims to reintegrate the beneficiaries into the school environment, in addition to promoting professional training opportunities: in short, it is about getting adolescents off the street, offering them an apprenticeship and promoting in them a different vision of their own future, a change in their own way of looking at life.

Youngs between 15 and 19 years of age

The target audience of the Game Change actions are young people between 15 and 19 years old, who do not work or study, from up to 28 different neighborhoods in Fortaleza. Four of the beneficiaries of Hogar Santa Mónica aged 15 or over are already part of this program.

Saint Mónica Home will try to ensure that all its beneficiaries in this age range can participate in Game Change, since it contributes a lot to enable them to have an independent, dignified life, with a profession and the ability to build their own future.

Révia Costa is the manager of Game Change area 01 in Fortaleza, and she describes the main challenges that the project must overcome: “We have several difficulties: first, there is the territorial issue, because unfortunately the young people of Fortaleza cannot move freely around all the spaces in the city, so the team must be aware of the territorial limitations in each case to ensure that they are properly protected. security”.

Armed groups

The city of Fortaleza has several geographic areas under the control of armed groups of organized crime. Every resident within an area is identified as a possible enemy by the other factions, so in practice there is no freedom to move within the city. Upon entering a neighborhood controlled by another group, anyone can be threatened, detained, assaulted or even killed.

Hogar Santa Monica, a special place

The Santa Monica Home of the Augustinian Recollects in Fortaleza is a very special place. It is a vital space where girls and adolescents who have suffered or are at serious risk of suffering violence, abuse, exploitation, deschooling or any type of aggression are hospitalized by order of the competent authorities to receive therapy, regulated education, a place to cover all your material and emotional needs.

The conditions of its beneficiaries, therefore, are very different from those of the other young people and adolescents who participate in Game Change. Révia notes in this some advantages for this institutional alliance that has already begun: “We realized that the participation of the girls from Saint Mónica Home in Change of Game has empowered them, in the sense that they have personal control over time and place, go to other places of learning or work as a means of guaranteeing their future. This gives them a certain freedom that they use with the responsibility of perceiving, of knowing, of learning things; they leave their daily structured and regulated world to take a bus and go alone to the course, to play sports, to grow as people seeing themselves as something more adult. In addition, Game Change provides them with a monetary scholarship with which they can buy small things that they like, it initiates them in the practice of responsible consumption and knowing how to manage their own assets. Everything as a whole is a true empowerment, a new perspective for their future, which until then they perceived with doubts”.

Révia has already lived stories within Game Change that have become a real motivation to continue fighting for those lives through this project: “We had a very involved girl in her neighborhood, who did not study, did not work, spent the day sleeping and at night with friends on the sidewalk playing, organizing parties. In Game Change she was very participative from beginning to end, so that at the end of the course she obtained a position as an intern at Banco do Nordeste. She today she is enrolled in a Faculty of Administration. We have followed her evolution and her perspectives have changed completely. For me, personally, it is a great satisfaction, a motivating factor, to feel that it is possible to transform those lives that choose the path of citizenship and believe in themselves”.

Of the four beneficiaries of Hogar Santa Monica, two are studying Administration, one is studying Make-up and the other is studying Manicure and Pedicure.