Project Your Future
This is a brief description of the Project Your Future An initiative of project management professionals, with the suport of the PMI-DF Brasilia, Brazil Chapter and some Brazilian IT and Consultancy companies.
The Project Your Future Team developed course material using Project Management concepts to empower poor teenagers in Brazil by teaching them how to make and believe in their own choices. The youth participate in seminars designed to enable them to create a life project. In this supportive environment, they have the chance to create a vision and project the next year of their lives in terms of study, work and social life. In building a set of goals and actions for one year, they build confidence in their ability to take control of their lives and learn the basic concepts of project management at the same time.
PMI-DF has supported and provided sponsorship for the initiative since its inception in 2005. Since December 2006, the Project Your Future Team has also been meeting with the PMI-Washington DC Chapter board of directors and its liaison, Janis Carter, about working together to expand the initiative to USA.
The Project Your Future Team is in contact with the PMI-Education Foundation in Brazil and is completing the paperwork to obtain Charter Approval.
Below, is the description of the Project Your Future initiative written by the creator of the Project Your Future initiative, Marcelo Cota, PMP. In addition to Marcelo, the Project Your Future Team now has the support of 6 other project management professionals in Brazil and one in US.
Description of the Initiative
It all started in 2000 when Paul Dinsmore, a PMI Fellow who lives and works in Brazil, published a paper called The Project of Yourself or Your Project. I then started to think how important it was to take his message to the poor teenagers of Brazil.
At the time, I was involved as a volunteer in the digital divide issue, but I couldn't figure out how to mix the idea of a life project with the digital divide. But this idea stayed in my mind during some years.
In early 2005, I had a course at the Central Bank of Brazil (where I work), about Forecasting the Future or Scenarios. A sociologist, who was a University of Brasilia professor, conducted this course. Some of his examples were from the teenagers in poor communities. I then started to link his ideas with Paul Dinsmore's. The main idea was to use project management methodology to guide underprivileged teenagers to take control of their futures by developing a life plan.
To put it in practice, I decided to schedule a small workshop for office-clerks (boys and girls from 16 to 18 years old) who work at the Central Bank. They come from low-income communities around Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.
The workshop is made up of two sessions. In the first one, we try to motivate the teenagers to think about the future. We say that it is time for them to make choices, decisions about their lives. It is amazing to see that some of them don't even think or believe it is up to them to decide. I usually ask them who chooses their boyfriend or girlfriend? Do they do it themselves? Or is it their parents? After making them think about their choices, we start to show them in which dimensions they should think of their future. We talk about the importance of 3 dimensions: study, work (in Brazil you can start working at 16 years old as a kind of trainee, working as an office clerk, for instance) and personal life. We give them a form and illustrate possible answers. We then ask them fill this form as homework.
In the second session, the teenagers present their findings, read aloud their responses to the form, and talk about their project of the future. We noticed that once they write and talk publicly about their future, they are more committed to accomplishing it.
From 2005 to 2007, more than 320 teenagers have participated in this workshop. We have some testimonies about how they started to think seriously about their lives. They started to take control. They discovered that they are the ones that make decisions about their lives. So I think the results are fantastic. We have started an assessment with them, I don't have the final numbers, but it seems that at least half of them indicated that they have put in practice what was in their projects.
I have a testimony recorded from an 18 year old girl. Her name is Jaqueline. When she was16 years old, she dreamed of going to college, but it was just a dream. She didn't think she or her family could afford the expenses of higher education. She then took the workshop in 2005. She pointed out that she wanted to go to college. When asked, who would be her partners in this objective, she only could think of her mother. When asked, what actions she would need to take in order to reach her goal, she just wrote that she needed to save some of her money to use it in the future. In early 2006, she took our workshop again. This time, she wrote down the names of the many partners she noticed she had, then she put down lots of actions to be done so she could reach her goal. She decided to keep her savings and to partner with a friend to study 3 additional hours a day so she could pass the college entrance examination. In early 2007, she and her partner passed the exam and entered college at a small university in Brazil. Because of her good score on the entrance examination, she got a scholarship, not a full one, but enough for her to use with her savings and guarantee her studies for the next 4 years. Jaqueline is an afro-Brazilian girl who didn't think she could make it, but did.
I think this is a good example to show how important is to expand this project.
We plan to introduce new improvements, like trying to make them think about the realities of young pregnancy. We do an exercise where they inflate a balloon and then the girls put it under their shirts and think how life would be or change as a result of having a baby.
This is just one of many others ideas we have for expanding the project.
I wrote a white paper about the project and presented it at the Brazilian national PMI event that is currently being translated from Portuguese. I am in the process of registering the project with the PMI Education Institute. Pilar Abad, another PMI-DF member who has worked on implementing the project in Brasilia is relocating to Spain and plans to investigate options to work on the project in that country. In August 2007, we are starting courses in Sao Paulo too.
The purpose of this short description in English is to prepare us to discuss ways in which PMI-DF, PMI Washington DC and PMI itself can collaborate to expand the scope of this project beyond Brazil.
