Lamberti Trasforma & Aventura de Construir

Silvia Caironi founder and manager of Aventura de Construir talks about the NGO and the project Lamberti Trasforma

By Silvia Caironi, co-founder of Aventura de Construir

24 Feb 2021

A social commitment that generates a profound and personal transformation.

I was born in Milan and in my life I had the opportunity to know very different worlds and places. But South America is the land that has conquered my heart, with its colors, its souls, people and smiles. After various experiences between North America (World Bank and MBA) and Peru (Presidency of the Council of Ministers and Caritas del Peru) I was offered to start a new human and professional journey in Brazil.

"Aventura de Construir" was founded in 2011 with the aim of providing microcredit to small, low-income entrepreneurs from the western outskirts of São Paulo.

After a thorough research on the territory, we realized that what was most necessary was not the only and simple provision of microcredit, but the training and tutoring for the management of micro-activities, because the small entrepreneurs who live in those territories do not they had access to training programs.

The name "Aventura de Construir" derives from the belief that to build a business it is first of all necessary to build, train the person and that building a business is itself an adventure that requires a lot of courage, audacity, desire to get involved, resilience.

In this sense it is first of all a human adventure: only when you have the opportunity to realize your dream, through your work and within your own reality, is there a real growth that allows you to change people, the family, the community, the territory.

This is something that we at Aventura de Construir have gradually discovered, learning from reality and from the people we have met. This is why we are focused on entrepreneurship and not on charity, because the latter does nothing but postpone needs but does not respond to the real needs of people.

We believe that sustainability has a lot to do with putting the person at the center, with their intellectual and creative capacity to identify a path and make it a reality. If we look at the concepts of Social, Environmental, Governance (EMS) Sustainability we understand that, if we do not focus on the development of people, all these terms have no meaning, they are simply words on fashion.

The project: Lamberti Trasforma

I met Leonardo Valentinis - General Manager of Lamberti Brasil - in the Advisory Council of “Aventura de Construir”. Together we went to visit some micro-entrepreneurs. Coming back, he said to me: “Do you know what's the difference between us and them? We had the opportunity to study in major Italian universities, we had an opportunity that they did not have. "

He was fascinated by the ability, intelligence and resilience of these people and when Lamberti started talking about sustainability projects he proposed to present a project with Aventura de Construir.

The initiative was immediately picked up by Samuel Aleman, Lamberti's Sustainability Manager, who proposed very specific guidelines. The project was to be addressed to women with children from Nova Odessa (the city where Lamberti Brasil is based) who, due to the Covid 19 pandemic, had had to stop working and thus found themselves without income and who could be helped, thanks to digital technology, to undertake its own business.

The project is called "Lamberti Transforma" precisely because it wants to contribute to the transformation of people by making them protagonists of their own change. For this to happen, they must feel valued, seen in their own potential and must cherish a dream, a great ideal but, at the same time, they must also “be able to put their hands in the dough”, that means experiment in doing.

This is why we often talk about G-local, or building something that has a universal value starting from the particular. Because the particular is the reality that these people live, the universal is the fruit of an abstraction if it does not arise from many individual stories.

In practice, we have involved many more people in our project than will actually participate. A network has been created where people involve and report other people, there is a sort of movement, of multiplication.

We realized that in reality direct contact between one person and another is much more effective, much closer and even more engaging than the official channels of official organizations and the media.

Our partnership with Lamberti stems from sharing this vision. Sharing values and objectives is fundamental in the relationship between a company and a third sector institution and a public beneficiary. The company is not simply a resource provider but an essential component in the realization of the journey , which is done together and which must take into account everyone's goals. The more you have common goals, the greater the shared values and the greater the chances of success of the project

The role of Lamberti employees

We talked before about the involvement of people in the project: I was very impressed by the availability of Lamberti employees, who made their professionalism available to the project. We have already defined the contents of the training and there are cases in which Lamberti staff will actively participate, to follow some of these micro-entrepreneurs more closely, participating in training and mentoring, accompanying them with face-to-face advice.

So there is the possibility that someone from Lamberti could become a sort of a "volunteer angel" for each of these small businesswomen, helping to clarify their doubts, reporting the hesitations of these people to the project representatives. Because what we have verified to work in Aventura de Costruir's projects is this possibility of customization, of offering an individualized service to each entrepreneur who will be part of the program.

Steve Jobs, called to speak at Stanford to people graduating in 2005, said: “Always Stay hungry, stay foolish”.

To the women who will participate in the project I want to say: do not be afraid to pursue your dreams, because trying to realize your desires, your dreams, is the engine of life.