This blog post is part of Zemanta’s Blogging For a Cause campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

I know, I am too late for the campaign (it ended on June 6), but I still want to talk about a small NGO here in Belo Horizonte. It exemplifies a lot of small projects and programs that have an enormously positive impact on people’s lives but that are not visible global campaigns or may not even have a web presence.

Programa Pólos Reprodutores de Citadania is a small non-profit managed by the legal faculty of the Federal University of Minas Gerais and allows students to help favela (shanty town) inhabitants in Belo Horizonte and poor communities in the North of the state of Minas Gerais through action research. The work includes conflict mediation, psychological support for victims of violence, land tenure regularization and more building bridges between the different social strata that are very divided in Brazil.

If you know Portuguese you can find out more reading the initial project document.