This article is the first blog in a short series on Covid-19 and São Paulo, Brazil.
Citizenship needs to be rebuilt in these post-pandemic times – the lessons that come from below can help in that reconstruction.
“One thing led to another;” anyone who researches marginalised and racialised communities’ fight for rights or access to public services has most likely heard this phrase before. For community leaders, political activists, and members of civil society organisations, a social problem never comes alone: it always brings with it other simmering issues further exacerbated by some political or socioeconomic crisis.
Read more in the São Paulo series:
- Giving people choice: Casa do Povo’s social innovations during Covid-19
- From the plate to politics: the case of solidarity kitchens
- São Remo: local coordination and universal care during Covid-19
- Social innovations during Covid-19: the case of Solano Trindade Agency
Demands for rights are not made in isolation, but part of a larger set of struggles to attain real citizenship. In the history of social movements in São Paulo, it is common to hear this narrative about the practical connection of problems and solutions built from the bottom up. The very space for exchanges and conversations between residents and neighbours about common problems has historically made it possible to organise innovative projects and aggregate common demands to public authorities in areas such as health, education, public transportation, and other essential services for the reproduction of life in the city.
The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic made it no different. Brazil was one of the most affected countries in the world, with the second highest number of deaths caused by the virus. Disaggregated data show that poor populations, black communities, residents of favelas and peripheral regions were the most affected in terms of contagion and deaths, largely due to the difficulties in carrying out social distancing.
In addition to public health issues, the pandemic amplified several other problems related to physical and mental health, education, food security, and violation of other human rights.
The federal government adopted a denialist policy regarding the severity of the virus. Although it offered an emergency aid with amounts higher than previous social programmes, it continued with neoliberal policies that sought to reduce its responsibility in the face of the health emergency and provide the necessary social policies that could mitigate covid’s socioeconomic effects.
Faced with this scenario, several communities, social movements, civil society organisations, and local governments mobilised to meet the social demands that emerged or intensified with the pandemic. Our series of blogs describe some of these initiatives, highlight commonalities, as well as lessons that can be useful for local governments.
Building Back Better from Below (B4)
The aim of the B4 project is to analyse cases of social innovation in food security, public health, and political representation developed as a response to the pandemic in three cities: São Paulo, Brighton, and Toronto. The multidisciplinary team is led by researchers at the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap), the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the University of Toronto, together with several community and voluntary sector practitioners in the three cities. Some of these practitioners are the co-authors of this series of blogs focused on social innovations in São Paulo. These organisations and movements had food security as a priority focus, but, as one thing led to another, they ended up doing much more. They are:
- The Solano Trindade Agency, which develops a healthy and organic food project in the southern outskirts of São Paulo and distributed lunch boxes to the most vulnerable people. The Agency also has one of its members as a co-councillor in the Quilombo Periférico, a collective mandate in the city council, representing the population in the outskirts of São Paulo.
- The Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST), who built popular restaurants where ready-to-eat meals are made and distributed to different vulnerable communities through its Solidarity Kitchens.
- The Casa do Povo, which offered open food baskets focusing mainly on immigrants living in the centre of the city and then developed action fronts to support immigrants, women, and other vulnerable populations access fundamental rights.
- The São Remo Collective, who self-organised during the pandemic to distribute basic food baskets to residents of the favela and ended up also developing Covid awareness campaigns and helping residents access other rights, especially in health.
Intersectoral collaborations as social innovation
What struck us most as we analysed these actions was the interconnection between different needs, demands, and local solutions by the organisations and the population, highlighting the importance of intersectoral coordination between public policies and social projects. Once again, “one thing was pulling another” and what started as food aid grew into many other types of support and collaborations.
This is why Solano Trindade, initially focused on cultural themes related to racial identity, began to work with food security and later decided to join other collectives to launch a candidacy for the city council. This is why MTST, a movement focused on housing, saw the need to offer food choices to a population that saw their economic conditions worsen further. Casa do Povo, famous for its work in culture, quickly noticed the need to listen to the different cultural and traditional tastes of its beneficiaries and open the food baskets, allowing them choice. They listened further through conversation circles and developed an action front to help them meet other emerging demands. Finally, in São Remo, by trying to feed the entire favela community leaders discovered health-related issues which were unknown to them until then. That made them develop other actions, such as awareness campaigns about the pandemic and healthcare support.
Through their actions, these organisations helped marginalised populations access the state at the height of the pandemic: helping with enrolments in the federal single registry of social programmes (CadÚnico) and access emergency aid; providing legal help to immigrants; making referrals to health services; and claiming greater representation in political institutions.
Constructing welcoming spaces for people’s demands
These stories show the importance of active listening besides facilitating citizens’ access to rights and entitlements. Active listening not only allows unveiling demands often relegated to the background but also local solutions that often need to be integrated. The main lesson learned points to the centrality of establishing permanent spaces welcoming socio-popular demands, where the intersectoral articulation of active listening and response to these demands is consolidated.
A key interest in this collective research is the sustainability of innovative initiatives that were crucial in minimising the effects of the pandemic on marginalised and racialised communities. For that, the private resolution of public problems by civil society organisations, philanthropic entities, and volunteers cannot be the rule. But besides thinking of how to scale up these innovative experiences, policy actors might also want to think about how to scale down their institutions to further cultivate grassroots innovative capacities. This calls for the state to both develop public officials’ and administrators of social programmes’ active listening skills to adopt a posture of partnership, as well as nurture local leaders’ capacity to articulate citizens’ demands.
Read blog 2: Giving people choice: Casa do Povo’s social innovations during Covid-19
Read blog 3: From the plate to politics: the case of solidarity kitchens
Read blog 4: São Remo: local coordination and universal care during Covid-19
Read blog 5: Social innovations during Covid-19: the case of Solano Trindade Agency
