27 | January | 2012
Saúde Criança at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Dr. Vera Cordeiro, founder of Associação Saúde Criança, will speak to an audience of 300 people, including leaders in philanthropy from all over the world, at the inauguration of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Visitor’s Center. The event will occur on February 1st, in Seattle, WA, USA. In a panel entitled “Innovation in Making Change,” Vera will highlight the challenges and solutions she has faced in achieving positive results in the last 20 years of her work at Saúde Criança, which has been able to provide greater social inclusion for nearly 10,000 families living below the poverty line, translating to more than 40,000 people.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aims to educate, inspire, and motivate visitors to work together and join their efforts to improve the human condition. The new Visitor’s Center’s main objective is to expose those individuals who play a unique role in society. In this regard, they have the support of Ashoka, an international organization that for 30 years has supported social entrepreneurship and connected 3,000 social entrepreneurs with a large network of respected partner organizations. The goal is to encourage the exchange of experiences and promote innovative solutions to global issues. Vera Cordeiro, founder and CEO of Saúde Criança, has been a member of Ashoka since 1993.
Associação Saúde Criança works to restructure and promote the self-sustainability of families at social risk whose children are under care at public hospitals. The goal is to break the vicious cycle of poverty and suffering by providing families with holistic support that addresses their overall well-being and not just the disease. The organization’s methodology has been adopted by 23 other social institutions and Saúde Criança currently counts 12 franchises in Brazil and one international office in New York, under the name Brazil Child Health.
