• Diaconia
• Mission
• Vision
• Brazilian contextual challenges
• FLD’s commitment to defend the human rights and to promote sustainable development

Lutheran Foundation of Diaconia

The Lutheran Foundation of Diaconia (in Portuguese, FLD – Fundação Luterana de Diaconia)  is a private non-profit organization, legally constituted. Its headquarters are in Porto Alegre, RS, Southern Brazil. FLD was established on July 17th, 2000 following a decision by the Council of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil (in Portuguese IECLB-Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil). In 2010, FLD celebrated 10 years of committed work with socially vulnerable groups and impoverished communities, making no distinction of ethnicity, gender, political stand or religious creed. FLD is the successor of the Service for Project Development of the IECLB which had more than three decades of experience in the area of development of communitarian projects in the Brazilian territory.

Diaconia

The FLD carries a diaconal vocation in both its name and mandate. Diaconia is service in action that comes out of the Christian identity; it happens in the context of suffering and injustice, and it aims at transforming that reality.

To fulfill its mission, the FLD supports and accompanies organized groups of the civil society that work to strengthen the protagonist role of people and their communities, especially in regards to quality of life, citizenship and social justice. FLD acts ecumenically to support those groups of the organized civil society, whether they have a religious affiliation or not. Above anything else, FLD aims at transforming the unjust society.

 

Looking from a different perspective, the FLD also understands and acknowledges its specific mandate in relation to the Christian communities, especially in strengthening their mandate and diaconal action. During the past decade, FLD has contributed in several ways to the growth of the diaconal work in Lutheran congregations and diaconal institutions, in the ecumene and in the civil society in general.

MISSION

The mission of the FLD is give support and accompaniment to programs and projects of organized groups of the civil society that aim to ensure people’s and communities’ protagonist roles, promoting quality of life, full citizenship rights, and social justice. 

VISION

In its vision, FLD has the challenge to be reference among national and international partners in issues of project methodologies and social management, supporting people in their struggle for human rights and building inclusive and sustainable communities, where people can have their basic needs met while respecting the natural environment.

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Brazilian contextual challenges

Despite the economic stability and the betterment conquered in the last decade because of social inclusion policies, it is still true that human rights violation, wealth disparity, and environmental destruction place Brazil among the most unequal countries in the world:   

The richer 10% makes 46.9% of the wealth while the poorer 10% makes only 0.7% of the wealth. Wealth owned by the richest 1% (560.000 homes) equals to the wealth of the poorest 50% (28 million homes). According to the Applied Economic Research Institute (in Portuguese, IPEA-Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada), in 2007 there were 54 million people (30.3% of total population) living in poverty in Brazil, that is, living with a monthly income per capita of up to half the minimum national wage. It gets worse because within those 54 million, 20 million (or 11.5% of the entire population) live in extreme poverty, where the family income per capita is about ¼ of the minimum wage (Armani, 2009).

 

The whole complex of human, economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights (in Portuguese, DHESCAs-Direitos humanos, econômicos, sociais, culturais e ambientais) is still a faraway reality in the Brazilian society. The understanding that nature exists merely to be exploited dominates. Certain issues of extraordinary importance to the survival of humanity and the Planet, like the necessity to preserve the biodiversity and the respect for the traditional peoples, are considered to be an obstacle to development. Brazil is a huge country where the regions differ considerably from one another. There is a very common assumption that Brazil is, in fact, several Brazils.

The following numbers exemplify very well the Brazilian socio-economic inequalities: 67% of the poor are Afro-Brazilians; 70% live in urban areas and 51% live in the Northeast region. Such numbers mirror a historically built condition of social exclusion. Among the causes of poverty is the fact that 50% of the working force has had only four years of formal education at the most (and among those, many cannot read or cannot understand what they read). Even if the access to education has improved, the conditions that grant permanence and success remain very unequal. Investment in education continues to be very low. As a consequence, school evasion among the youth is very high (one out of six kids does not attend school).  

It is important to highlight that in the present moment Brazil has one of the highest percentage of young population in the world. However, at the same time the country is losing that population in a fast and tragic way. Especially among male Afro-Brazilians, homicide rates are extremely high, comparable only to countries at war:

According to Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (in Portuguese, IBGE-Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística), there are 50.5 million Brazilians between 15 and 29 years old. The most common victims of violence in Brazil are male, poor, and Afro-Brazilian between 15 and 24. In 2007, more than 17.4 thousand young people were assassinated in the country (the equivalent of 36.6% of the total accounted homicides that year). There are 50 homicides for each group of 100 thousand young people in Brazil. (Mapa da Violência 2010 – Anatomia dos Homicídios no Brasil. Instituto Sangari).

The young Brazilian population, from children to teenagers, has been the most critically affected by drug addiction, especially crack, which causes quick and profound addiction. Those who survive and make it through the painful process of treatment, have to live with the severe physical and emotional problems caused by crack.

Domestic and sexual violence and violence against young people constitute a serious problem. According to UN Report (2007) 300,000 women suffer violence from husbands or partners each year in Brazil. Legal protection should be granted by the Maria da Penha Federal Law, approved in 2006, but the law is very little applied. In addition to the women themselves, their children also suffer directly or indirectly from this kind of violence that seems to grow deeper and deeper.  
When we consider public policies in the area of children’s rights advocacy, there is a lot of hard work to be done. Especially in that area, the answers are given in the context of the municipalities, where differences are an important issue. While some municipalities have organized well their networks for social protection, other municipalities do not even count on basic services, such as councils for Children and Adolescent Rights.

  
There is violence motivated by gender, generation, or ethnicity in urban and rural contexts and in formal and informal spaces. Although Brazil is remembered and known for its ethnic diversity and for a variety of cultures and behaviors, there is much to do to overcome prejudice and the physical and psychological violence, and to improve the protection of the rights of the traditional populations, the Afro-Brazilian population, the women, the homosexuals, the elderly, and other segregated groups.    
When we come to HIV/Aids, Brazil is worldly known as a country that has done its homework. Its handling of the epidemic is ranked among the best in the world with a strong emphasis on the partnership between State and civil society. That partnership has been able to stop the growth of the problem and has elevated the life quality of the people living with Aids. However, we face today a very important shift in the scenario: HIV/Aids is becoming more and more a reality of poor populations, with growing rates among women, youth and elderly, especially in small towns. Those populations are not well aware or informed about the theme and they find huge challenges to access proper treatment, because of the inefficiency of the public health system and also because of other social, cultural and emotional vulnerabilities. 

Power inequality is also strong in the agrarian and agricultural arena. Family agriculture, the way of life in 4.1 million properties (84% of the total) is responsible for 77% of all rural jobs, 60% of all the food produced in the country, and 30% of the Gross Domestic Product (in Portuguese PIB – Produto Interno Bruto) of the farming and cattle raising sector. Surprisingly, family agriculture owns only 20% of the productive land. Historically, governments have emphasized agribusinesses, aiming especially at the production of commodities, in a proportion much superior to the support given to family agriculture and to organic production.
The land reform did not advance as expected during President Lula’s two mandates. There are still 6 million landless families:

The Report of the Social Network of Human Rights in Brazil, 2009 (in Portuguese, Relatório da Rede Social de Direitos Humanos no Brasil) disagrees with the numbers published by the Federal Government which affirms that, between 2003 and 2008, 519,111 families were relocated onto new settlements. According to the report, that number is not in conformity to the new settlements (in which only 183,308 families were settled, much below the goal of the Government). The numbers publicized by the Government incorporate those families who had their land legalized, or had granted their rights to remain in old settlements or still, those who had been resettled due to the displacement cause by the construction of power plants. According to the Report, there are more than 100,000 families living in tents in the fields, and more than 800 thousand enrolled in land reform programs, in addition to 2.5 and 6.1 million families interested in the programs.   

 

Campesino social movements do their best to keep on fighting the many challenges ahead, such as the State-sponsored criminalization of NGOs and social movements, to weaken the struggle for the right to land, water, forests and territories. In addition to that, in many cases, conflicts in the field result in murders and slave work of men, women, youth, and children.

Nutritional and food insecurity afflicts 72 million Brazilians, 15.4 million of those live in rural areas, where, in theory, food is produced. There have been initiatives where the government buys food produced by family agriculture to help the families’ organization, empowerment and food distribution, so that poor families from rural and urban areas may have access. Such practices, however, are not enough to trigger processes for local development that promote dignity, autonomy and security – both in terms of nutritional and biological quantity and quality – for the production and  the consumption of food.

Brazilian environmental laws and their social controlling system have not been able to overcome the opposition, present within and outside the government, toward a much needed conciliation between the protection of the natural resources and economic development. The new Brazilian Forest Code does not offer adequate answers to the present planetary crisis, which encompasses issues of climate, biodiversity and models of development. The Code will certainly be reformulated as it is being discussed in the federal legislative sphere. 

The Brazilian dominant model of development is oriented by the logic of economic growth. This model takes into consideration the social questions through the creation of specific, complementary or compensatory benefits to compensate for the logic of economic growth. However, the model fails to make a balanced and systemic integration of social and economic questions, let alone environmental questions. That is revealed when we look at the difficulties in reducing the emission of gases responsible for global warming to the standards established in international treaties.

Traditional populations, such as the descendents of quilombolas (descendents of slaves) and indigenous people, represent hope to overcome this ambiguity between economic progress and social awareness of the environment. Those populations possess great diversity in organization forms, social connections, and the use of traditional technology. They also have a more systemic knowledge and understanding of life.

FLD’s commitment to defend the human rights and to promote sustainable development

In this context of social exclusion and rights violation, FLD acts supported by the theological assumption that all people were created in God´s image, with the right and capacity to live a just, humane, and dignifying life in sustainable communities. Faith implies rejecting any condition, framework or system that generates and perpetuates poverty, injustice, and disrespect for human rights and fosters the destruction of the natural environment. Sustainable development demands taking decisions that seek to preserve human rights and the natural environment and to promote the betterment of life quality by suggesting more sustainable lifestyles. For this reason, in this triennial plan, FLD is putting together two strategic axles of human rights and sustainable development. By doing so, FLD signals toward the yielding of continuous and shared actions to promote right with development.   

Development requires that anything that causes privation of freedom needs to be removed, especially poverty, which is the most important. Poverty is a violation of human rights and a threat to human dignity. It steals from people their freedom to create a better future for them and their families. Fighting against poverty implies supporting the needy in their struggle for human rights. It also implies empowering peoples and communities whose rights were violated in a way that allows them to overcome those conditions and become able to determine their own future, increasing their capacities, knowledge and access to resources.    

Sustainable development prizes the territorial dimension, the local management of regions and micro regions by means of a cultural and political dynamics that transforms the social life. Local self-organizing ability, active participation in citizenship matters, and the feeling that the community “owns” the process are essential elements for sustainable development. In local territories it is possible to build democratic and productive spaces, where the social actors, governments, and civilian organizations organize themselves to maximize the local strength and the set of activities. The support given to the process of development must be complementary to a dynamics that is peculiar to the local society. Urban and rural spaces have their own dynamics that are getting more and more interconnected. FLD stimulates that proximity and exchange of experiences in order to value the potentialities born out of the encounter between the rural and the urban.    

 
As far as the rural sustainable development is concerned, FLD will give special attention to the systemic models of relationship between people and the natural environment. Those models are oriented, not by the simplistic substitution of agriculture fertilizers or pesticides or by a behavioral change, but by the principles of complexity, interconnection, and dynamic equilibrium of the systems that embody the social, cultural, environmental, agricultural, ecological and economic dimensions – such as the agro-ecology and associated models and proposals (agro-forest systems, biodynamic agriculture, permaculture, education in rural areas, environmental education, etc) – seeking to strengthen family agriculture, food security and sovereignty and the preservation of natural resources. FLD will give priority to support the rights of the traditional communities, especially the right to land and territory and to ethnic development. FLD will also prioritize the lessening of the effects of climate change.    

When we come to the issue of urban sustainable development, FLD has tried to give special attention to the guarantee of labor rights by supporting communitarian initiatives that foster work and income, especially those led by women and youth, and also initiatives of fair trade. The focus lies on the creation of a new way to look at urban development by the recovery of the ethical dimension of the economy and by acknowledging its role in the transformation of the society. As happened in the case of rural development, the importance of empowering social movements is also highlighted – in this case, urban social movements – and the movements’ proactive role in creating public policies.   

Social transformation results from intricate processes in which several subjects take part. The civil society fulfills a central role for the improvement of rights. It demands that the governments are held accountable for the protection and promotion of human rights. FLD has tried to empower organizations of the civil society by supporting their participation in social processes of decision making. FLD has also supported proposals to make their lives better and it has worked actively to  intervene in public policies geared toward sustainable development and gender equity (gender equity here encompasses the analysis of gender issues in developmental actions and the participation of women in the condition of active players in transformative actions, and as dynamic promoters of social transformation).