People at Camp - Marcelo Da Silva
We asked a few of the track and lab facilitators, and a few of the Camp participants, some questions about themselves, their work, what they did at camp and what they came away with at the end of the week.
Marcelo is an activist from Brazil. He has been campaigning on issues around the Amazon for the last 15 years, ten of which were spent with Greenpeace. More recently, he is one of the founders of the non-profit Escola de Ativismo, or School of Activism (www.ativismo.org.br) in Brazil.
The School of Activism's mission, says Marcelo, is "to strengthen political agents who act in defense of sustainability, human rights and democracy," with an emphasis on "collaborative construction of learning processes."
The School "works mostly with learning...what is a campaign, what is activism, what are nonviolent techniques...there are many grassroots movements and collectives without money but enthusiastic to do something. The challenge now is how to help them to create zero dollar campaigns to win."
Security is important: "The government is using intelligence agencies to monitor social movements. So we need to help them [activists] work with digital security. Three points were very useful for me at the Camp: Digital security apps and measures, technology for activism (in general) and networking.”
"At the camp I realized that we have many issues that we must develop in our learning process, such as investigation, curation, security, design for activism etc.... One of the important things about this camp was the methodology, because we have been promoting camps since 2011 for Brazilians. It introduced me to another way of doing things. Tracks in the morning, labs in the afternoon. The opportunity to share abilities, skill share moments...The lab about digital security."
"We have a pedagogy but we are always learning and we will incorporate the methodologies learned here. Camp also put me in contact with people who can help us."
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