I wonder here …
I was sitting here, I participated in a few TEDx in my life.
I was very nervous, seeing so much information happening at the same time.
I imagine your head must be a piracy, am I right?
So let’s do a pretty cool deal right now?
Take the side there of your friend and say: “Tamo together!”
(Laughs)
It’s kind of confusing, it has a lot of information,
but in the end, we are together and will be all right.
If I were to look, for the last two, three years,
I never imagined that one day I could be here.
In fact, neither I imagined nor my friends imagined,
I guess nobody would imagine it and it’s being really cool.
But on this, I want to bring some of the context of what it was like to be here.
So I’m the son of Eliete and Sergio.
And I usually say that in my house, I was very privileged,
because I was born well in the cradle of social business,
but still did not have that concept.
My father an entrepreneur, my family, from his father, many keychains.
My grandfather, my great grandfather, my uncle … I was a keychain one day.
And my very social mother.
My mother was that person who, I remember when I was little,
she made sandwich, had that cashew juice,
she would take it to Praça da Posse to give to the children
and spent the whole Saturday.
She did this for a long time, until one day
She could not do it anymore.
because he saw that strange things were happening.
It started with 30, then it was 28, 27 …
In the meantime, she began to discover that the children were disappearing
either because they were being arrested or because they were dying.
There was always some tragedy.
Then my mother went there, joined my aunt,
and had a wondrous idea of renting a house,
put all the kids inside and take me to live together.
(Laughs)
I remember that my mother, in this process of convincing,
said, “Wow, you play ball alone, now you’re going to have a lot of friends!”
(Laughs)
And then, it’s kind of impossible to talk about family if I do not show almost everyone.
I did not get the photo with everyone.
But at the time there were 19 street children.
Each one with its history, each with its own moment.
And I was born in that environment,
of a very enterprising guy with a very social person.
But the same concept of social business I only had in college.
I do not know how you are, if you will understand,
but college for rich and for poor is completely different.
They may be in the same place,
but minds work in completely different ways.
Example: college for the rich is a very fun thing,
because the rich man’s family understands
that college is an investment in the medium and long term.
So he can enter college, can change college,
can spend a year out, “I’m sick of Brazil”,
then he comes back, and, in the end,
he sees that he does not want to graduate because he does not like college anymore.
The poor … in my case, when I went to college,
I went to do Production Engineering,
and I already went to college as an engineer, right?
For my mother.
(Laughs)
(Applause)
Thank you. I think some people identified there, right?
(Laughs)
And then I entered as an engineer,
my mother introducing me to the accounts and saying “this has to work.”
And I always wanted to be an entrepreneur already in the first period,
my mother already charging me, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur.
And I got involved with various entrepreneurship initiatives within college.
In these initiatives, in junior companies and such,
I went there and managed to organize an entrepreneurship event.
And then, a friend of mine, who was about 20 years old,
said, “Dude, I wanted to go there and talk about business.”
I said, “Dude, business? You’re 20?”
He: “Yeah, I want to talk about business for the young girl.”
I said, “All right,” and I called him.
When he arrived, he said, “I’m going to talk about social affairs.”
Then I said, “Wow!”
When he spoke, at this very moment, “social affairs,”
in my head, came a little song:
♪ Having a friend is so good in life … ♪
This song came very much, I imagined:
“No, I’ve been through philanthropy my whole life.”
Not that it was a bad thing, but I did,
I saw the problem that my mother was going through, to ask, to stay in the NGO.
It was funny, or had Miojo for everyone or had no one.
So I went through this a lot and I said, “Man, I do not want to.”
But then he took me there to talk about social business.
And I said, “Go on, talk and I’ll pay attention.”
When he began the lecture, he started with a very strong question:
“Between making money and changing the world, what do you choose?”
I had never thought of that.
In my mind, changing the world was a completely utopian thing.
I would never get there.
And making money was my coming charge.
And then he said, “Man, if these two questions come in your life,
Did you know you can choose both? “
When he said “choose the two,” came a sparkle in my eye:
“Wow it’s true!?”
Then he started to introduce me
and I started to study a lot about social business.
I began to study much about Muhammad Yunus,
about what he could do.
And the concept was very clear, it’s companies that are born
already with its vocation to solve a social problem.
And I said, “Dude, that’s cool!”
That was it! That’s exactly what I needed.
Only, when he told me about social affairs,
I do not know if you will identify with that either,
but in my head, social business lodged in a corner that:
It’s a cool idea, but I’ll never do it.
You know, those strong phrases of effect, that we lodge in a corner of the head
and say “I’ll never do it”?
And then I went, my dream was to be an entrepreneur.
and went inside, diving, working in a coworking.
At the time, this word was very fashionable, it was too much.
And when I first heard the word “coworking”
I already knew it was class A, “crème de la crème,” you know?
Because nobody in the community speaks:
“Let’s go there at the coworking”, there is no such thing.
I went there and kept looking for many opportunities within coworking.
And then there was a manager of “whatever.”
(Laughs)
You have a manager, right?
(Laughs)
I went there, I signed up, I was good, I made this process, I went inside.
And one of the things that caught my attention was the following:
when I stepped there, I saw a white, blonde crowd,
everyone handsome and I said: “Man, people who have a lot of money, beauty”.
And the guy said, “Lunch on the spot is on us.”
I said, “Oh!”
(Laughs)
I’m from São Gonçalo, I’m from community.
So, rich food, to me, was what I put together the entire month
to eat at the weekend, and for me, that was the best food.
Then, in my head, I said, “The guys eat barbecue, sushi …”
That’s what’s on the rich man’s plate.
And when I got there, my first day was soon a bucket of cold water,
My first dish was an eggplant lasagna.
(Laughs)
I said, “Beauty.” And I asked the cook,
“Is it eggplant lasagna or lasagna with eggplant?”
She: “No, eggplant lasagna.” I said, “No, you can not.”
The next day, it was a vegetable pot pie.
I said, “No, it’s not possible …”
On the third day, it was quiche. I do not know if you know what quiche is …
But it is neither pastry nor souffle. He’s in the middle, you know?
(Laughter) (Applause)
And then I was completely desperate.
I said, “Man!”
The first three weeks, I ran away because I had to have lunch there with my boss,
he would say, “Ah, I’ll go there in the corner.”
I’m going to talk to you now, I was going to eat a little coke,
and in the last week I did not have the money to play this ass.
He did not.
And then I went there and ate the eggplant lasagna,
the vegetable pot pie.
It was a somewhat different experience,
but I began to feel a different kind of well-being.
And I said, “Dude, cool!
People eat in a different way, it’s not what I expected, but that’s okay. “
In the meantime,
my family started having diabetes problems.
My grandmother lost a limb, lost sight of the left eye
and a good percentage of the right eye.
I had never heard of diabetes in my life,
and suddenly my grandfather was also amputated,
finally, a number of things began to happen.
And I said, “Man, what did I have to do so they would not go through it?”
And what I was told at that moment was this:
“It was only they having a healthy diet.”
And this healthy eating they said, I kept asking myself,
“Dude, how? How?” And he was talking …
When I saw the recipe, it was all I ate there, instead of the rich galley.
And when I went to São Gonçalo, I could not find it.
And I began to realize the following …
I said, “Grandma, let’s do this, I’m going to start buying food for you.”
Only, when I went to buy, I saw that it was very expensive, that it was not accessible.
I do not know how many of you eat salad,
but if they find a cheap place, tell me!
Because it’s too expensive! It’s absurd!
And I came to the conclusion that healthy eating was not something affordable.
And when I came to that conclusion, I started asking a lot of people …
After all, he was in a coworking, several companies, several entrepreneurs.
I said, “Man, why do not you sell healthy food in the communities?”
And they said, “Man, the poor man will not eat. The poor man will eat beans and flour.”
“It has ‘sustenance’.”
Is not that what we’re talking about?
“Poor will not want this.”
When I spoke about bringing healthy food to the communities, they said: “What madness”.
But you know what I did? I went there. I lived in the community. I dropped everything.
I lived in Vital Brasil.
From Vital Brasil, I lived in another community in the Northeast,
I went to spend periods, to understand habits and customs.
And I began to see that people did not eat because they were not presented.
And healthy eating was presented as if it were not for them.
And then, inside the communities, I started to search for some data
and I saw that 13% of the population carries type 2 diabetes.
My grandmother was in there.
And 51% of the population has at least one disease associated with food,
being that 68% of the population was of class C, D and E. And it is where it does not have.
I was very annoyed by this and I said:
“Dude, we need to create some sort of solution.”
“And we have to change that reality.”
And when we started thinking about how to change that reality,
people said: “We need to create a brand, a company
that is from community to community. “
The point is, if we put it on Google today:
“healthy eating in Rio”, we will see white, blonde,
blue eye, with envy body,
and healthy food placed for a group.
And when I started working on it, a lot of people said,
“Ah, but there are several legal projects that take what is left over from CEASA,
turns into food and gives … “
Calm down, the community does not know what’s left over?
We do not know what that is?
We know that’s all there is to it.
Is it a legal project? I think it’s cool. But calm down …
Are you going to give me the leftovers?
And then we started working on a democratization, to potentialize.
We went to the communities and started giving food training,
how to handle,
and we created a community “delivery” to the community.
We wanted to know what the guy
who finished eating a salad inside the community, which he did.
We were sure he was not going to get the puppy, listen to Justin Bieber
and run into the pond.
(Laughs)
We definitely knew it was not that. But…
(Applause)
We definitely knew it was not going to be that. I was sure.
And he wanted to know what this guy was going to do.
When he ate salad, I would say, “What are you going to do?”
The girls said, “I’m going home, I have to take care of my son.”
And the boys would say, “We’re going to throw burns up there.”
I said, “So let’s potentiate this? Let’s take good photos,
let’s say that this is communitarian here, that this is yours,
does our business work on potentializing these activities?
It’s from community to community, so let’s do it! “
And then, we went through something that would be very frightening.
Because we have created a business within the community for the community,
as people would not see it as a competitor.
And we started to move the local economy.
We started talking like this: “Calm down, back then, I had to buy
healthy food around the corner,
had a transport mega-job,
and within the community I discovered that there were people who planted, sold chicken,
that they sold the items that we needed and that we were buying out.
And we started to bring a legitimacy into the community.
We said, “Calm down, I’ll buy it here because it’s the best.
I know that there in Copacabana has a legal deal,
but from here, ours is better.
Because all the products are from here.
And it began to bring about that empowerment involving the affairs of the community.
And then, I think to finish, we had a very emblematic moment,
that, in front of our business, has a house of “podão”.
Do you know what it is?
I think so … Ah, everyone has already proven it, right?
(Laughs)
Then there was a house of devon, and then he went there by my side and said:
“Are you selling healthy food in a community, cheap, why?”
I said, “I think people will want to.”
And he: “I also want to, do the following:
every part of vegetable, which is hydrated and washed,
send it to us, we’ll buy it and insert it in our pod. “
Then we started to change the mentality of the community itself,
and they began to understand that this is now theirs.
And that’s why I believe that social entrepreneurship
is a very strong tool of transformation.
And I wanted to leave a question for you.
I think this moment is really cool to bring several reflections.
You have heard me talking about various dilemmas,
they said that favela does not eat well, that food is not for the favela,
it is not this and that other.
And I wanted to hear from you:
“What is the dilemma that keeps you from changing the world?”
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
”
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