Located in the São Franciscano hinterland, northeast of Brazil, the civil association ACARI, has been developing actions since 2004, being officially established in 2005.
ACARI is an NGO dedicated to the work of construction and implementation of public policies for women, youth and children – www.facebook.com/ongacari/. It has a multidisciplinary team, experienced in working with the population of this region through cooperation with those committed to achieving its main objective: to promote citizenship, to defend human rights and to struggle for political, cultural, social and environmental democracy. ACARI adopted the ICDP programme. It has been running projects ever since a group of professionals from ACARI received ICDP training from Nicoletta Armstrong in 2010-2012.
ICDP trainer, Ilze Braga, a psychologist from ACARI, informs about the development of a new ICDP project in 2022:
During this year, Simone Souza (ICDP trainer) and I, have been developing together a very special project here in Pernambuco, Bahia province in Brazil. The project is called “Bem Me Quer: lead a family life with love, dialogue and understanding”. Our key strategy has been the ICDP programme.
This initiative is supported by Kindernothilfe (Homepage – Kindernothilfe), a large Christian organization founded in 1959 in the German city of Duisburg. It operates in developing countries with the aim of enabling girls and boys to live a dignified life, free from poverty and violence.
For this project we produced new ICDP materials, that we call “a kit for positive interaction”, which proved very popular with parents.
As a result of our work 340 children and adolescents from Fundação Lor Feliz and Projeto Vida Nova will experience healthier family life that minimizes the use of psychological and physical violence. These families are now leading positive interactions with their children.
It has been very rewarding for us to see that families were becoming very interested in attending our ICDP sessions. They have been putting into practice the received knowledge with great enthusiasm. Children and adolescents who participated in this project have been developing positive interpersonal relationships, and started communicating assertively with their peers and family members.
Ilze and I hope to travel to the ICDP Network Conference in Colombia, in November this year, in order to meet up with other ICDP teams from Latin America, to learn more and to share this experience.