Great Minds

Leonardo Martins Dias_Great Minds Conference

My speech at Great Minds was on a developing project aimed to reduce the world inequalities efficiently, raising deprived areas' - favelas' - autonomy through grassroots leaders empowerment. From a systemic point of view, deprived areas are an important leverage point for sustainability. World deprived areas are a key leverage area to develop, due to its high inequality concentration, high diversity, local characteristics like creativity, tenacity, etc.

To watch the conference's video please click on the picture (English & Spanish versions)

"We had the honour of working with Leonardo in Great Minds. He has made his work his life's cause and this is evident in how engaging his presentation is and the passion he transmits when talking about his subject. What is best about his projects is that they are oriented for people, to help people and he works for them to have a better future. Léo is outstanding in professional excellence, as a conference speaker and, above all, as a magnificent person. I sincerely recommend his work and urge you to get in touch with him to obtain details about all his social inclusion projects."

José María Robisco , CEO, leadership expert, founder of Great Minds - Spain / UK

More details about the conference's content as follows:

Besides launching grassroots leaders nationally and internationally, we offer a high level and wide range of skills and networking, enabling the achievement of social impact, directly and indirectly by influencing public policies, to be scalable for their projects.

Inspiring Leadership for Sustainability in Rio's Deprived Areas program empowering local organic (natural) leaders by providing them with vital leadership, business, social entrepreneurship and project management skills. In addition we build a network to enable their projects and the experience to work with investors to co-create and implement projects that meet the needs of the community. The learning journey is based on an education for diversity, equality, experience, interactive dynamics, participative methods and collective impact generation. U-process, System Thinking and Co-creation are transversal tools on the program.

Leaders leave the program with a concrete project co-created with the community, sustainability specialists, funders and all partners in order to work by implementing the project. Job creation is key for communities' development. Stakeholders are engaged with the project because they addressed their needs since the begining, during all co-creation process. We learn through experience and generate incomes to local people who work in the project implementation, multiplying knowledge inside the community and enhancing program's scale. Considering program's future sustainabiliy, they end the program with a real network that can support future projects. An incubator is created to support this process.

Main project's objectives are:

• To engage and empower local grassroots leaders in order to enhance local community autonomy and resilience, improving sustainability in favelas.

• To train new leaders from the slums in sustainable decision making, leadership and project management.

• To co-create other social projects to be implemented.

• To involve leaders' networks (companies, governments and associations). Working this way they can directly work implementing the projects and enhance their own life conditions and communities'.

• To support private companies postioning in deprived areas.

• To support governments to manage deprived areas issues.

I would like to thank GREAT MINDS and its team, specially José María Robisco, for the invitation to speak in this conference.

Related Publications:

Example of related project:

Inspiring leadership for sustainability in Rio's deprived areas