Salve Criadores with COVID Lab

Challenge

Brazil is one of the countries hardest hit by the COVID-19 crisis. While the government refrains from providing support and a quick response to the pandemic, a large part of the population did not have the chance to comply with isolation, especially black and peripheral populations.

Peripheral communities are the most affected by the COVID-19 crisis, due to the lack of quality health equipment, access to basic sanitation, and decent housing conditions. Communication channels and traditional media outlets fail to reach a significant number of people in this group. These communities are also the ones already feeling the impacts of the climate emergency – but in general they are left out of the climate debate.

Approach

We believe that by better understanding this scenario, empowering local leaders, creating partnerships, and providing resources for initiatives that create credible and creative content, we can find connection with strategic audiences while strengthening black leadership.

Strategy

We mapped independent and peripheral São Paulo media collectives and selected four of them to work with, using criteria such as diversity of territories, languages and audiences.

From there, we created an agenda of content production that could, based on the subject of the pandemic, connect with other agendas already discussed by peripheral leaders- such as public health, education and climate justice.

The material produced by these four initial partners served as a reference for the creation and distribution of content by six influencers, four video producers and three podcasts, with whom we partnered throughout the project.

Under the #SalveCriadores seal, leaders and content creators from São Paulo outskirts encouraged a debate over 2 months between black and peripheral youths on COVID-19, health, basic sanitation, inequality and other themes, touching lives and concerns of these territories’ populations.

We went through a three-step process for the campaign development:

1. Partners mapping & empowering local leaders

In partnership with the local articulator Mariana Belmont, we selected projects Alma Preta (Black Soul,) Periferia em Movimento (Moving Periphery,) Rádio Cantareira (Cantareira Radio) and Nós, Mulheres da Periferia (We, the Periphery Women.)

2. Coordination of collective actions and audiences and messages testing

Based on the content agenda established with the organizations, we created a strategy for distributing messages and for testing audiences, evaluating how different proposed discussions were perceived by each audience.

3. Experiencing new engagement and strengthening of local players tactics

We created a public calling to select and finance three São Paulo outskirts video producers. Furthermore, we also partnered with three podcasts created by content producers from the São Paulo outskirts and six São Paulo influencers, which all promoted debates on the public call’s themes.

We partnered with six influencers who created content and aroused debates on the pandemic, its connections to other structural issues, and its impacts on black and peripheral communities. We also partnered with three podcasts created by producers from the outskirts of São Paulo- QuebradaPod!, Depois da Roda, & QuebraDev.

Salve Criadores was effective in reaching black and peripheral youth in the outskirts of São Paulo, and collaborating with local creators in order to create an engaging campaign. The following are some testimonials on the campaign: 

« Salve Criadores allowed Alma Preta to breathe deeper during the COVID-19 pandemic. (…) In addition to the resources, Alma Preta accumulated some very interesting experiences, such as a greater dialogue with Rádio Cantareira.”

“By developing this work alongside with other collectives, we added important value since agenda meetings, in which we could broaden our look at the week’s theme, and having the opportunity to distribute content by all groups involved, in particular, at Rádio Cantareira, expanding our reach and enabling a closer link with community radios to think of ongoing partnerships of mutual collaboration.”