TEDxAmazonia - Carla Mayumi | She reveals the leaders who will change Brazil - Nov.2011

Good morning, everyone.
As Denis has said,
we made this promise
and proposed this challenge to ourselves a year ago.
We've fulfilled it.
We spent the whole year doing this research.
It was a large... it still is a large qualitative study
and we are now at a qualitative stage.
We've talked to over 1000 young people during this qualitative stage.
We've talked to over 1000 people,
and now we are traveling around Brazil doing the quantitative research.
As in all research,
we worked based on a sample target population
that we wanted to analyze.
The population we selected should be thinking a little bit about the future.
So we talked to young people.
Our sample was young people ranging from 18 to 24 years of age,
who are in this red part of the pyramid,
which is just a representation of the way we think,
of the way behaviors influence other people.
This part of the pyramid represents those people who,
on the subject we are researching,
are more involved, well-informed,
are more passionate, or more engaged than the average person.
In our case,
they were more engaged with the subject of Brazil,
and also with the subject of quality of life.
We talked to young people,
not just any young person,
we talked to those who are already doing something,
who are already thinking about how to improve the quality of life
of the people around them.
Speaking of quality of life,
we came across an issue with those young people:
quality of life is different for everyone.
It is different for me,
different for each one of you and especially
it is very different depending on the reality of where you live.
I’m not simply talking about different social realities.
I refer to any type of reality you live in.
We realized that to think about quality of life today,
the young person depends on understanding someone else’s quality of life.
This is a sentence that
was repeated in many ways,
and we heard a lot from the young people,
that my well being depends on someone else’s well being
It is not possible to think about quality of life or well being for myself
if I don’t take into account or if I don’t consider
other people and understand how they can live a better life.
It’s a more collective thought
which the young are opening themselves to and living by.
This brings us to an important issue
that comes from the following question:
"How can I understand other people’s quality of life,
which can affect mine?
How can I experience a little bit of this other reality
so that I am able to understand it?"
And the answer to this question is the main message we want to give here,
people need something very simple,
but very powerful, they need bridges.
People have needs, they want things, they want to know, live,
understand, and learn, mainly from these other realities.
They want to know worlds different from their own.
To know these unknown new places
often times mystifying, even frightening.
They need people who act as bridges,
people who can help them cross to the other side,
who take them, receive them and introduce them to this new universe
with a different quality of life,
with a way of operating that is different from the one we are familiar with.
We found lots of people like that during the work.
Here is a picture of one of them, Thiago.
We discovered lots of others,
we have lots of wonderful stories,
which we will share when we finish this study,
which will be concluded next year.
As the story of this young woman who studies fashion,
in a highly reputable fashion school in Sao Paulo
but who was standing in line waiting
to sign up for a modeling course
because she wanted to understand how those other young women
who also like fashion,
experience fashion in a universe so different from hers.
Or the young men and women who get scholarships
to study at a Catholic university,
to go to college in a private university
to get to know what happens on the other side of the tracks
to bring it back to their reality
and to share their own experience with this new reality.
Lots and lots of people
who are engaged in any type of project, community-oriented project,
they are just participating in these projects
because they want to bring different realities closer together.
whether they are social, cultural, or any other kind of different reality.
We wanted to call upon you
because of what we’ve been through yesterday and today
listening to everyone who spoke here, talking at the tables,
we see that a lot of people
here today are these bridge builders.
They represent people who can take us
to the other people who are not bridges,
but who want bridges to these universes we need to get to know.
I ask those of you who are bridge builders
to understand and take on this role,
to understand that there are lots of people around you
who just want a hand to get to the other side
and that the other people try to identify these bridge builders
so that they can cross.
I will finish up with a quote
of a person from the community Demos Helsinki, who presented today.
"Bring down the walls of separation".
We wanted to propose actually
that we understood that these walls,
or these obstacles, may become bridges.
That’s it. Thank you.