Anna Penido

Anna Penido, an experienced journalist in Brazil, is using communications training both to stimulate active citizen participation and to create new professional opportunities for impoverished youth. By providing access to technology and emphasizing the importance of education, she helps young people influence the way they are portrayed in the media.

Anna has created a modern, high-tech multimedia training center that prepares marginalized youth to take on the role of change agents in their communities. Developing skills in communications technology and improving esteem about public images, Anna's program cultivates personal qualities in Brazilian teenagers that they will be able to use in the professional world. Trainings in journalism, filmmaking, comic book art, and Web page design emphasize the conscientious application of communications media so that participants not only learn marketable traits but also accept their responsibilities as influential civic leaders. Anna helps students develop and deliver their message to a public that is otherwise unaware of young people's vast potential. Moreover, Anna's program allows youth to influence their portrayal in the public eye and advocate for greater access to technology and media in poor communities.

Brazilian teenagers, like young people around the world, are thoroughly enchanted by the media. Magazines, radio, television, and movies hold sway over young people's imaginations. The Internet influences teenagers whether they have a computer at home or not. Media outlets bombard teenagers with advertisements and messages about family, the nation, relationships, world events, crime and violence, economic class, and scores of other topics. Media's impact is especially pronounced in Brazil, when as much as 50 percent of the population in some cities, like Santiago where Anna's program is based, are under the age of 25. Lacking the skills to produce media effectively or interpret its messages critically, teenagers become its subjects, rather than its masters. At a systemic level, the media disenfranchises youth and thwarts their development. Evening news programs, for example, rarely portray young people, and when they do, youth appear usually in the context of society's problems. Advertising further strips teenagers of their agency, diffusing their tendency to question authority in favor of the latest brand-name fashions, fast food, and sports cars. Political complacency is currently at an all-time high. As a result of Brazil's grossly imbalanced distribution of wealth, the positive role media can play has not even been considered in most communities. Most children attend school for fewer than six years. Only 3 percent of students reach university. Only 3 percent of all Brazilian schools have Internet access, and only the richest private institutions have classroom access to media resources like computers, televisions, and VCRs. For the most part, Brazilian public schools have made no major technological advances over the past 50 years. Nearly 40 percent of young Brazilians who do not attend school are unemployed. Those with jobs earn very little, usually less than $100 per month. Most young people work as servants, salespeople, and waiters, but unlike their counterparts in the United States, they have no hope of promotion or career change over time. As a result, poor Brazilians turn to mass media as their most accessible cultural outlet.

Anna founded Comunicação Interativa–or Cipo (meaning vines) for short–in 1999 to facilitate collaboration between three main actors: young people, who take training courses and gain media expertise; schools, which receive curriculum materials developed by Cipo participants; and media professionals, who learn directly from young people how to best represent youth. Cipo's activities are centered in an eight-month professional training course for poor young people, emphasizing critical analysis, writing skills, verbal expression, aesthetic appreciation, and emotional awareness. The intensive course meets four days a week for three hours each day. Anna designed the program not only to help young people learn about media professions but also to provide students with the skills to succeed in any profession. Participants take place in individual and group activities designed to challenge independent thought and facilitate group solidarity. The second course component teaches the young participants how to set objectives, build project budgets, and construct schedules. Cipo provides funding for transportation and meals, but the youngsters are responsible for managing their own daily calendars. These skills are included for their practicality and transferability to other areas of personal and professional development, with less regard for their significance to the communications business. The third part of the course, focusing on production, requires the students to form groups based on their particular field of interest: video, photography, Web design, comic books, or journalism. With the guidance of specialists in each area, participants elect a topic and create projects with a clear message of their own design, including youth development, health, politics, and community relations. Additionally, every participant takes part in a two-day shadow course in which they accompany a professional mentor to work and share their experience with the other members of the group. The final section of the course concentrates on the complicated processes of media editing, publication, and distribution. The materials that the Cipo participants create are industry-standard, made with the best paper and full-color printing. The young people package their final projects, which they have designed with high-quality technology and the best available resources, for evaluation by a team of communications professionals who invest their time and expertise in order to learn how to more accountably portray young people's interests in their fields. The mutually beneficial dialogues that take place between the teenagers and media representatives are unprecedented in Brazil–a tribute to the innovative nature of Anna's program. The communications professionals help Cipo circulate the final projects among the general public, including media outlets and public schools. In 2001, 1,000 youth-developed media kits were distributed to schools around the country. One hundred and thirty young people have graduated from Anna's training course over the past two years. An effective part of Cipo's community-empowerment strategy is a reunion held every six months for program graduates to discuss their progress and lend advice to other students. An annual poll of program participants has shown that although only 20 percent say they intend to pursue higher education before enrolling in Cipo, 100 percent of graduates list this as a personal objective for the short-term future. Fifty students from the first class of 80 have even returned as program volunteers and four have won scholarships to serve as course monitors. Moreover, many course graduates enroll in Cipo's four additional social media projects–a youth-in-the-news media watch, a production company, a recycling initiative, and the Cyber School. In addition to Anna's contributions of resources and curriculum aids to Brazilian public schools, she has also developed a musical stage production of O Cidadao de Papel, "The Paper Citizen," based on the book by well-known journalist and social activist Gilberto Dimenstein. The play is performed by 17 actors between the ages of 14 and 19 and has been seen by 10,000 people so far. Anna is committed to sustainable, citizen-based financing–a decision she made after her corporate funders folded during the recent collapse of several Web-based companies. Her student-run production company won the 2001 Ashoka-McKinsey Social Entrepreneur Award for its professional business plan. Cipo Productions markets the students' media projects as citizen sector tools. The initiative supplies nonprofit organizations with top quality materials, directly inserts youth into the job market, and generates revenue to sustain Cipo's programs.

Despite its short lifetime, Cipo is already widely recognized as a center of excellence in Brazilian media and youth development circles. Anna is actively expanding her model to include new projects and serve in other regions and abroad. In the short term, Anna is disseminating her information about her program in the form of print brochures and educator trainings. Over the long term, Anna will continue to meet with Brazilian and international leaders in the fields of community development, youth empowerment, and communications media. Partnerships with national and international scope will be the key to the next step in Anna's development–the implementation of her model in poor communities around the world.

Anna is a born communicator. Her mother was a teacher of oral history and encouraged Anna to seek out stories and tell them. By the age of 10, Anna was already writing a newspaper for each year's family reunion. As she got older, she became involved in the Catholic youth activities and began to develop social projects that related to communications. She organized a group of classmates to spend their Saturdays in the Saramandaia neighborhood of Salvador, developing community outreach activities in poor communities. Based on her successes as a young leader, Ana was chosen as the Brazilian delegate for an international summer camp in the United States. This gave her new perspective on the interests and motivations of kids around the world. As a journalist, she wrote for major magazines and newspapers like Vogue, Veja, and the Folha da Bahia, winning the Bahian Press Association Award in 1991 for an article on volunteers. At 21, during the 1989 Brazilian All-School Games in Brasilia, Anna was asked to coordinate a group of teenagers from across the country to produce a daily newspaper during the two-week event. She organized a small staff and taught them how to research, develop, and write news reports. With her guidance, the teenage journalists met overnight deadlines with articles ranging in topics from citizenship to sexuality, cooperation to prejudice, athletics to drugs. Anna was amazed when the reporters transformed from shy, ordinary students into confident, articulate journalists by simply switching positions from audience to author. She resolved to discover what lay behind this dramatic shift and to bring the experience to other young Brazilians. Developing her experience in the nonprofit sector, Anna was invited to undertake an internship at the youth-focused Odebrecht Foundation that later turned into a consultancy. She was the communications coordinator from 1994 to 1996 and served two additional years as project manager. In 1998 Anna attended a four-month course called the Human Rights Advocates Training Program at the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University in New York. With extensive international contacts and new perspectives on her country's challenges in light of the world human rights movement, Anna returned to Brazil thoroughly prepared to put into action her new project that combined her strengths as a journalist with her nonprofit management skills. As a social entrepreneur, Anna has engaged disenfranchised youth, the communications profession, and the academic community in her enterprise that promises not only to change the way young people are portrayed in the media but also to provide them with tools to lead their communities, pursue their interests, and engage people around the world.