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During the pandemic, something emerged from the backyard of a house in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, a initiative aimed at children with learning difficulties from the community of Coroado. Thus was born the Uirá Association for Integral Development — a project that offers educational and psychological support to those who need it most.
- Award finalist Shell Iniciativa Jovem 2022.
- Multidisciplinary action: pedagogy, psychopedagogy, psychology, speech therapy and Occupational therapy.
- Psychological support also extended to families, when necessary.
Today, we have a multidisciplinary team and we are continuously expanding our impact with listening, care and quality education.
About Us
At the start of the pandemic, as we were dealing with the abrupt transition of our children’s school to a 100% virtual environment, we were neighbors in the Coroado community in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. Knowing that these difficulties in adapting to the virtual school environment were also being felt by the children in the community and convinced that socialization was critical to their learning, drawing on years of experience as a private tutor to the woman who would go on to become the president of our NGO, we set up the first class of what would become the embryo of Uirá in the backyard of our home.
At the same time, in academic research conducted throughout the psychology program by the individual who would later become the vice president and technical coordinator of the psychology department at Uirá, we detected a marked increase in cases of anxiety and also depression among elementary and high school students who participated in the study.
As a result of these initiatives, we created the Uirá project and applied to participate in the "Shell Iniciativa Jovem de 2022", for which we were finalists. That is how the "Associação Uirá para o Desenvolvimento Integral" was formally established.
The Brazilian Association of Psychopedagogy (ABPp) estimates that learning difficulties caused by specific disorders affect about 5% of the school-age population. Of these, 70% receive no support—neither outside the classroom, nor from their schools, nor from private tutors. It is precisely this gap that our project aims to fill.
Uirá Desenvolvimento Integral was founded to provide all the services needed by elementary and high school students who have any learning disability. We work primarily with children who live in the Coroado community in Santa Teresa and in surrounding communities, such as Julio Otoni, Prazeres, Chácara do Céu, Escondidinho, Fallet, and Fogueteiro.
Today we have professionals in education, educational psychology, occupational therapy, and psychology. We also have volunteer teachers for math, English, French, and Spanish. The psychology service also provides support to some of our students’ parents, when we identify a need and, of course, they agree to receive our assistance.
Recently, we have strengthened our ties with the Family Health teams that serve the communities in the region.
Our Name
The name Uirá was chosen as a tribute to Professor Darcy Ribeiro and his 1974 book Uirá, um Índio em Busca de Deus
“Uirá” means “bird” in Tupi, which gives us a sense of mission: to enable our students to learn to fly and soar as high and as far as they wish. With the little bird as our logo, we’ve adopted Mário Quintana’s “Poeminho do Contra” as our motto:
Everyone who is there
Crossing my path,
They will pass...
I am the little bird!””
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