WIN TICKETS to the Champions of Sexual Literacy Awards!

Win two tickets to attend the National Sexuality Resource Center’s fourth annual Champions of Sexual Literacy Awards honoring Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America!

This inspiring event will be held on Thursday, October 22^nd at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown San Francisco. Cocktails and Hors ‘D Oeuvres begin at 5:30pm. Each raffle ticket costs $5 or get 5 raffle tickets for only $20! (Tickets to the event are $75 each.)

All of the proceeds with help raise money for Projeto Focus, a photovoice project investigating themes of sexuality, gender and human rights in Brazil! Your money will help pay for batteries for cameras, technological support, and materials for an exhibition and educational campaign in the favela of Maré.

Please see our blogs below for more information on Projeto Focus!

To Enter the Drawing, click here for PayPal and send your donation to projetofocusrj@gmail.com (please send in US$ dollars--click "Personal" and send as a Gift) for a non tax-deductible donation. Your dollar amount will reflect how many raffle tickets will be entered in the drawing under your name. The winner will be drawn one week from today on Tuesday, October 20th and will be contacted by email!

OBRIGADA! Thank you for supporting this important project!

Would you rather help in a different way? We are also looking for an art person that could help us come up with a simple logo for our project and someone who could help us edit some of our photos. Please email us at projetofocusrj@gmail.com if you could help!

The "typical" man and "typical" woman of Maré

Typical Man of Maré:

“This man is young, black, colored hair, loves funk music and speaks slang. He uses drugs, he doesn’t study, he likes to dress in designer labels, he admires drug traffickers, he likes to fight--especially with the police and says he isn’t scared of getting shot. He likes his women very young and calls them dogs.”

Typical Women of Maré:

“She wants to have long hair and dresses in the style of the favela. She leaves school and gets pregnant, she continues to be single and she gets pregnant again. She doesn’t mind being called a dog and has a low self-esteem. She likes to dance and she falls in love, losing her adolescence in a hurry. She waits for her charming prince and wants to be like the women in the soap operas. Her dreams have been suffocated. She has been eluded. She doesn’t have rights; she doesn’t have wants; and she is just one more in the middle of many.”

Projeto Focus: Explorando temas de Sexualidade, Gênero e Direitos Humanos com Fotografia

Projeto Focus is a photovoice project involving 8 young people who live in the Complexo da Maré, which is a community that consists of 16 different favelas (slums) in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area. Maré inhabits around 160,000 people and is mostly governed by two main groups of organized drug trafficking. Inhabitants live in and out of a civil war that goes unrecognized by state authorities.

Through this project we have participated in workshops and learned about photography in order to "focus" on how sexuality, gender and human rights

(or lack thereof) play out in our own lives and communities.

Because of where we live, we must go to greater lengths in order to obtain an education, learn about our rights and find ways to access the healthcare we need. With your help, we will be able to tell the world our stories and design educational campaigns in our communities that will help give us a stronger sense of our rights and a greater sense of our self-worth.

This project has been coordinated by Kylene Guse, M.A., with the help of Promundo, an international NGO based in Rio de Janeiro that works to promote gender equality and prevent violence against women, children and young people in Brazil and around the world.