Global Citizen · 3 hours ago

I Grew up on the Streets of Rio. the Favela Taught Me to See Its Potential.

Celso Athayde spent his childhood selling sweets on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, learning to negotiate, read people, and endure - skills no school taught him but the favela did. What he built from that education is CUFA, an organization now present in more than 60 countries, turning culture, sport, and community organizing into pathways where exclusion once stood. The shift that guided everything was deceptively simple: instead of asking what should be done *about* the favela, Athayde and others began asking what the favela could do. "I want the world to look at the favela as a place to learn from, too," he says - and his life makes that not a slogan but a demonstrated fact. There is something quietly reorienting in his story: that the places most written off as problems are often where the most durable forms of human ingenuity and solidarity are being quietly practiced.