Vale restructures its social projects in the Country
Gazeta Mercantil - 01/26/2009
The Vale do Rio Doce Company wants to help better restructure the life of the communities where it works. In order to reach the goal, it put up an innovating project based on this tripod: human and economic development, infrastructure, and safety. The articulation of the process will be under the responsibility of the Fundação Vale (Vale Foundation), the social agent of the company that already benefits more than half a million people. According to Silvio Vaz, CEO of Fundação Vale, the proposal will work as a mechanism so that each part of the tripod stimulates the operation of the other. The first vertex is the human and economic development resulting from professional education, sports, and culture, which will benefit 30 thousand children and teenagers when the 30 units of the Knowledge Station (Estação Conhecimento) are ready until 2012. The Knowledge Station - Center for Human and Economic Development is a Public Interest Nongovernmental Organization (OCSPI, in Portuguese) and it was organized this way in order to allow direct community participation. The managing partner of the organization is Fundação Vale and it has also entered into partnerships with the local governments and the civil society organizations. The idea is to provide a legacy of knowledge to the communities, so that they are able to be the protagonists of their own development, in the long run, when the mining is not carried out any more. In the infrastructure vertex, Vale set the goal of reducing the urban and housing infrastructure deficits in these municipalities. And the third leg of the tripod, safety, will be achieved by fighting urban invasions, making it more difficult for the development of new slums.