The Dara Institute is a civil society organization that promotes health and human development through the implementation and dissemination of an integrated approach to combating poverty.
In 1991, Dr. Vera Cordeiro and a group of professionals from the Hospital da Lagoa, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, founded the Dara Institute. Since the beginning of its activities with socially vulnerable families, Dara has applied an integrated multi-sector approach to poverty alleviation and worked with the social determinants of health. Dara is recognized globally as an innovator and system changer in the area of health.
Dara believes that the social transformation of vulnerable families is only possible if different areas of human development are addressed simultaneously and in an integrated manner. Dara´s social technology, the Family Action Plan, is the result of this experience. The Plan, a participatory set of goals and actions in the areas of health, housing, income, citizenship, and education, is a program that provides services and tools that help families understand, collaborate, and take charge of their development.
Dara attends families at its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro that are referred by seven different referral centers: public hospitals, public social assistance centers, public schools. In the past, Dara has expanded its Family Action Plan program in various ways: as a social assistance and development program in the city of Belo Horizonte, through a partnership with a University of Maryland community assistance program, and through Girls Move, an ngo in Mozambique, as and influencing programs lead by social entrepreneurs around the world.
Today, Dara is implementing the replication of its health and poverty alleviation model in various ways: in partnership with the city of Itu´s social assistance program, and through a partnership with the family court system in Rio de Janeiro. It is also working through consultancies with the Federal Social Assistance network in the adaptation of Dara´s multi-sectoral approach and model to be applied at the social assistance centers countrywide. We are in initial conversations with the Vale do Rio Doce Mining Company to replicate the program in a coastal city in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Our new expansion Unit is developing tools and instruments so support expansion and setting up a replication staff nucleus who will work in loco at the different expansion centers.
The Dara Institute leads and encourages people's participation in efforts to create a more equitable and sustainable society. Dara's newest initiative toward this goal is a knowledge and information-sharing unit. The unit, a natural development of the experience accumulated over the last 31 years in the fight against poverty and the social determinants of health, has two purposes. It is the backbone of our expansion, a support program for partner organizations using the Family Action Plan; it is also a new strategy by Dara to broaden our efforts and impact in poverty alleviation through
Dara has helped over than 85 000 people in Brazil directly and millions indirectly in four continents.
