Joao Felipe Scarpelini is a 22 years old Brazilian-Italian social-educational entrepreneur that have been working since 1999 towards social change and community empowerment, accumulating considerably experience among this eight years working as an expert in youth empowerment and development in 23 different countries developing community-based social-educational and environmental projects for schools, NGOs, governments, media, international organizations and the United Nations.
He started his activism with a school-based project to increase youth engagement towards the problems in his neighbourhood. The project grown and became a model program of youth participation in the city, replicated later in other cities along the country. The idea was to inspire and support young leaders in order to allow them to make a difference in their own communities. Although he was not clear about what he was doing at that time, it was the beginning of his life commitment towards community empowerment and change making through youth-led initiatives.
In 2002 he became an ambassador of Peace Child International in Brazil. Peace Child is a 25 years old British-based international organization that works to empower young people across the globe and two years later he got invited to coordinate their actions in the country. In the first three years of his engagement with Peace Child in Brazil he was coordinating the national team and doing community work in slums around the cities of Sao Paulo and Santos, doing peer education and training community leaders for peace building, media and communication, sexual and reproductive rights, and active participation, doing local community improvements and reducing the violence on the area, also articulating and creating networks for information sharing and peer support locally and nationally.
From 2005 till September 2007 he worked at Peace Child Headquarters in the UK as the Institutional Development Coordinator, his work was mostly related to management and training of the international volunteers, designing new programmes, evaluating and re-thinking methodologies and achievements, defining marketing and development strategies, fundraising, negotiating with partners, represent the organization in meetings and conferences but most of all to support the development of the organization and all it’s field offices and affiliate groups in over 150 countries where the organization works.
These two years based in England and travelling for work all over the world gave him an amazing opportunity to experience local based grass-route initiatives from around the world connected into a global perspective. Along those years he was able to deeply research into co-management between youth and adults, what resulted in a publication by Peace Child called “Co-management – Becoming Equal Partners” that is a toolkit showcasing studies of methods to engage effectively youth and adults to work together into development initiatives. Apart from the vast practical experience he learnt from mentoring youth projects and programmes supporting them in the fundraising, marketing and project management.
Passionate about acting and communicating, he has used arts to raise awareness among youth in Brazil since early age. He began modelling for social campaigns and acting in awareness raising theatre plays. He himself wrote five theatre plays that were awarded in festivals in the state of Sao Paulo, he end up leading a TV programme on youth issues and became a reference in youth empowerment working as a consultant for most of the media working with youth issues and trying to engage young people in the country.
In 2003 he got invited to live a nine months experience as one of the 10 teenagers to be the headline characters of the articles from CAPRICHO Magazine in that period of time, CAPRICHO is the biggest youth magazine specialized in youth issues in Brazil with a readership of more than 800.000 adolescents. His role was to promote youth action and inspire other young people with his life story. It worked so well, that after the end of the project; he got invited to start as permanent columnist discussing youth participation and global issues for that magazine.
Right now, he works as a consultant and international correspondent for the ABRIL media group, which CAPRICHO magazine is part together with another 26 magazines; internet portals and TV and Radio channels. He is also a correspondent for a couple of other international publications and websites such as Revista Viracao, World Youth Citizens Magazine, Positive News, etc.
Independently he works as a consultant of youth-friendly marketing, development strategies and social responsibility for organizations and companies that want to engage with young people. Currently he is a Youth Expert at Flamingo International agency. With experience as a consultant in projects for clients such Microsoft, Nokia, Pepsico, Apple, Youth Action for Change among others.
