Audi 2006 Annual Report Download - page 79

Kristina Michahelles is a freelance
journalist and translator focusing
on business and the environment.
She works for daily newspapers,
television stations and news magazines, and
lives in Rio de Janeiro.
“Project Fun” also means the aspiration
of escaping from the clutches of poverty.
The group gives the children security.
77AUDI 2006 ANNUAL REPORT
her brother since 1994, took him at his
word. At the University of São Paulo,
where Senna used to go jogging, she
discovered a project that aimed to
bring about social change through
sport.
Audi, at that time venturing into
Brazil for the first time, was looking for
an appropriate means of becoming in-
volved in social activities on top of its
business operations. The partnership
with the Senna Foundation soon
meant that the programme developed
at São Paulo University could be ex-
tended to 16 different universities
throughout the entire country.
The basic idea was to use sport as a
gateway to personal and social devel-
opment. The universities provide the
facilities and the teaching staff, and
the Senna Foundation trains them and
coordinates the annual exchange of
findings. There are 1.3 million children
with no schooling in Brazil. Around
three million children have to work.
According to official statistics, approx-
imately half a million young people
aged between 15 and 24 in São Paulo
alone did not finish primary school.
The number of street children is rising
by the year – children and youths who
are exposed to poverty, homelessness,
violence, drug abuse and discrimina-
tion.
For Viviane Senna, that is the crux
of the whole programme: helping
children to live with the financial and
social circumstances of their families,
to overcome conflicts and barriers,
and to be able to take decisions within
that context. “I never cease to be im-
pressed at how efficiently children
make the transition. The project isn’t
some wishful thinking divorced from
reality; it is an opportunity for change.
Whatever they do later in life, they quite
simply learn what it is like to win,” says
the Formula 1 driver’s sister.
The “Educação pelo Esporte” project
has now been running for ten years,
and it is successful: a report from 2003
found that children and youths who
had taken part in the various projects
performed above the average at
school.
To mark the partnership between
Audi and the Senna Foundation, the
otherwise modest Viviane Senna now
has one big ambition: to roll out the
programme on a nationwide scale via
the Brazilian Ministry of Sport. Viviane
Senna explains how the expertise has
now been trialled over many years and
how the formula could work perfectly
well on a large scale. And her most
memorable moment over the past ten
years? “When a 14-year-old boy who
used to be working for the drugs boss-
es in the slums said to me: ‘There’s one
thing I find here, and nowhere else: the
opportunity to survive’”.