The WEF 2010 Countdown: What made João an activist? (2)

Saturday, 26 December 2009 | posted by Matt_BC
Global Youth Summit 2009, WEF Davos 2010

Never stop believing and never lose that spirit of initiative.

Hello everyone!

My name is João Brites and I am a 19 years old b-boy from Palmela, a small village in Portugal, studying Business/Economics in Lisbon.

The strict university and the daily break-dance trainings can make you have a busy day – but we all have our defining moments in which we feel the necessity to step-up and, like my friend Gilmore would say, we start realizing that we rather prefer “to be the wind that drives the current, than the water that flows in the stream”.

The first defining experience came by being a swimmer. I had trainings of more than 3 hours in a daily basis and a team that used to run outside the pool side-by-side with me while I was having the races. This taught me that although sometimes you make all your efforts and you don’t achieve what you wished, that’s the real world, only trying harder and harder you can achieve it next time. Because there is always a next time, in the same way that there is always a next race.

After left swimming, I went to the streets to learn b-boying (media call it break-dance) and from 2006 onwards we almost unconsciously start using break-dance shows and making free dance workshops as a way to express what we learned with this dance to teenagers in schools with criminality problems and to people that face social exclusion or poverty.

Throughout all this years in this CAP by “teaching” others I have been teaching myself and realized how broad can be the frontiers of our actions, from the moment you incorporate the change you wish to see in the world in your life and work.

Finally, one of the moments who gave me more inspiration came with a project of a cross-country race I made at my school with 4 friends to promote healthy habits on young people and revitalize a degraded area of our high-school destroyed by a fire.

At the time, our own professors called us dreamers and told us that they had already tried to do the same, and couldn’t do it, so we wouldn’t be able to do it. However, in the space of three months we had 16 sponsorships and a totally clean and healthy school (the video is about his project). As this project finished the Lisbon autarchy sent us a message I would like to share and say to all of you:

“Do never stop believing and do never lose that spirit of initiative”

Do never forget that, in the same way my swimming team used to race side-by-side with me and me with them, you will always have a team of global changemakers racing side-by-side with you on the way of meeting challenging social changes.

Many greetings from sunny Portugal from the first breakdancer in Davos,

João