Rio volunteering & dance holiday, Brazil

On this holiday you get to personally take part in a social project that makes a difference to your destination instantly but also on a greater scale. As you take part in the 'Make Favela Art' social project, you will be helping to paint the houses in one of Rio's poorest areas, making a big difference to the lives of the residents, many of whom cannot do this work for themselves due to illness or age.

Not only will you be helping make the favela a nicer place to live by improving the residents' daily environment, you will also be helping to realise the larger goals of the project: this is more than just painting and decorating, as the aim of the project is to paint all 15,000 houses in Prazeres, a favela visible from many prominent parts of Rio, in order to transform it into a huge brightly coloured landmark, part of a scheme to challenge and overturn the negative perceptions and stereotypes associated with the favelas and their residents, a vital part of improving the lives of those at the bottom of society.

We believe in making a difference, both to lives of our clients through an inspirational experience of Brazil but also to the destination. We do in the following ways.

Basing our holidays in a designated sustainable tourism area, where tourism is accommodated using the existing infrastructure (no high rise hotels or fast food chains) and is managed to ensure it has minimal environmental and social impact.

Providing 25% of the running costs of a local social project that offers out of school educational and recreational activities for children and teenagers in a local Rio favela. During the holiday, we will take you to visit the social project, an opportunity to see where some of the money from your holiday is going, to interact with the children in the project and see the positive impact the project is having in their lives.

Carefully choosing suppliers who work in a socially responsible way: for instance, the dance school in which you will be taking lessons also runs free dance classes for young people from local disadvantaged communities, and the Capoeira school that we use is run as a social enterprise, using the revenue from customers like us to fund Capoeira education for young people who cannot afford to pay for the lessons.

Choosing and recommending local service providers to ensure the money we use goes back to the local community. We use a bed and breakfast network for our accommodation which not only provides a valuable source of income to the local host families but is also run as a social enterprise, providing training in the principles of sustainable tourism to local ancillary service providers (waiters, bar, restaurant and shop owners, taxi and cable car drivers). We also use a local transport cooperative to provide our transport and recommend excellent local bars and restaurants and hiking guides.

Giving our clients a full briefing on the economic and social realities of the country in which they are staying, plus advising on appropriate behaviour, and providing a complimentary Portuguese lesson to enhance communication with local people.

Offsetting carbon emissions: we work with Climate Care to offset the Carbon emissions caused by our business and all the flights we take. We add the price of the carbon offsetting for our clients’ flights to the invoice as an optional additional charge.