Instituto DARA

Special news! Today Saúde Criança will be renamed Dara Institute.

Dara means guiding star in an Asian Sanskrit, a two-way guide: on the one hand, the work of volunteers, employees and contributors; on the other, the strength of entire families that guide us to work for those at-risk. “In the past three years, we realized that the name – Associação Saúde Criança – no longer reflected the growth and mission of our organization, which operates on four fundamental pillars: the direct care of families in social vulnerability, the influence on public policies, the production and dissemination of knowledge and social mobilization”, explains Dr. Vera.

The name change represents a repositioning of our brand and the strengthening of the cross-sector work we have developed for almost 30 years fighting poverty with at-risk families in the areas of health, education, income, citizenship and housing.

Over the years, we have directly changed the lives of more than 75 000 at-risk people and have become public policy in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais. Our DNA has been taken by other entrepreneurs to four continents, contributing to changing the lives of more than 1 million people.

For eight consecutive years, Dara Institute has been considered the best NGO in Latin America and the 21st best in the world by the Swiss publication NGO Advisor. The institution works to promote health and human development through the implementation and dissemination of an integrated approach to combat poverty. It was founded by Dr. Vera Cordeiro, in 1991, with a group of professionals from Hospital da Lagoa, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Currently, Dara works with the [Brazilian] Parliamentary Front for Early Childhood and advises the United Nations Development Program on the review of public social assistance policies with the University Maryland, in the USA, in addition to maintaining a partnership for transferring the PAF methodology and applying it in a community in the city of Baltimore.