Canto da Rua, a Brazilian social organisation, developed a collective strategy in partnership with Fundação Dom Cabral to aid the street-dwelling population in the city of Belo Horizonte. To achieve maximum impact, the project was centred around the “Open Strategy” methodology, which fosters collaboration with external communities to create a shared future. The project successfully achieved its mission to articulate organised actions and clear accountability to donors.

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Considering society’s grand challenges, such as homelessness, collaborative responses seem to be the way to achieve better results. Thus, Canto da Rua a social organisation dedicated to assisting the homeless population in the city of Belo Horizonte (BH) in Brazil, undertook the construction of a strategic plan based on a collective approach called ‘open strategy’, with the help of the FDC Business School.

The process ran from August to November 2022 involving  internal and external collaborators, such as suppliers, partners, universities and research centres. The open methodology was used to solve complex social problems, leading to the promotion of more effective solutions. It also creates social capital, strengthening the cohesion of those involved and allowing them to use their relationships to achieve the desired results – as became the case for Canto.

The pandemic and the rise of Canto da Rua

When the crisis of the new coronavirus broke out in Brazil in March 2020 and city halls in several cities decreed the lockdown, the Homeless Apostolate of BH had to act in an emergency way to take care of the street-dwelling population. The crisis initiative was supported by several private volunteers, the Development Department of the State of Minas Gerais, bodies of the federal and state justice system, the City Hall and foundations of private entities. The enterprise was considered successful: the population was welcomed, fed, and referred, and many were housed in temporary housing. However, as the pandemic subsided, the country’s economy deteriorated, and the number of homeless people increased. In BH for every 100,000 inhabitants, 340 were homeless. The multi-sector stakeholders involved in the project decided to join forces so that the collective action would become perennial. Canto da Rua, a civil society organisation was born with their support. They received the assignment of an area of land large enough to build accommodation and housing and where it will be able to apply its principles on a permanent basis.
The entity also received donations from private organisations and foundations such as ArcelorMittal Brazil. The counterpart demand was the creation of a strategic plan to guarantee the use of the resource in an organised manner. 

The challenge

FDC was the institution that provided guidance for the planning, and the challenge was configured in two dimensions – the design of the solution to deal with the homeless population in an integrated manner with clear accountability to current and future donors; and the ‘open’ strategic process with the beneficiaries as protagonists.

Designing the solution for homeless people

According to the Brazilian government, the homeless population is the group “that has in common extreme poverty, interrupted or weakened family ties and the lack of regular conventional housing, and that uses public places and degraded areas as a place to live and support, temporarily or permanently, as well as shelter units for temporary overnight stays or provisional housing.”  However, there is no integrated public policy that addresses them.

The great concern of Sister Cristina Bove, leader of the National Apostolate and the Canto da Rua Project, is that “the demands of the street population are transversal to the fragmentation of public responses: the pop street demands housing, but also work and income, health, culture, leisure and sport…”

Open Strategy Challenge

 It is recognised that expanding participation generates ambivalent effects in building an open strategy. Despite improving the content of strategic decisions, controlling the process is more complicated. Specifically, when dealing with a multisector entity the process can result in biased participation. These are characteristics raised from the literature, which still claims to lack empirical studies.

Thus, through an agreement between the organisations, the L&D initiative was articulated as action research. In this way, the teacher who guided the intervention also studied the process as it unfolded. This led to knowledge generation that is on the rise in academia. Therefore, we can summarise the initiative’s main impacts:

• Design an integrated solution to deal with the homeless population, taking advantage of knowledge acquired through the emergency period;
• Integrate the homeless population as protagonists;
• Build strategic planning with a high degree of participation by internal and external agents, with transparency and high-quality decision-making processes;
• Generate knowledge about social organisations’ open strategy process facing grand challenges and its effectiveness.

 

The L&D initiative

The PILARIS Program is a long-term approach focused on the development, management, governance and leadership competence for Civil Society Organisations. Besides the planning process, the organisation receives monitoring on specific topics and its managers are trained through a Leader Development Program. Members from eleven different entities participated in the planning process, which included ten workshops inspired by the classic logic of strategic planning. The group itself adapted the logic, customising each subsequent step as the process unfolded. FDC’s activities with the group included training (flipped classroom methodology) and referrals for strategic decision deliberation.

Considering the classic stages of strategic planning, the participants had a theoretical introduction to strategic planning and a proposed approach with stakeholders.
As protagonists of the process, the group prepared the following meetings and reassessed the choice of invitees for an extended group. With the process ongoing, they defined the priorities and, with the help of FDC, built the strategic map, discussing each objective and its integration with the whole. The definitions did not take place in a linear fashion. Throughout eight meetings the issues were renegotiatiated in terms of meaning and decisions.At the 10th meeting, the strategic plan was presented to public administration and civil society authorities, with 12 institutions represented, they approved the plan.

The open strategy dilemma

The process was in fact slower than the traditional one and many realignments were necessary to ensure consistency and logic for those whose participation was intermittent. In fact, every meeting began with a recap of the overall logic of the programme, where the programme was, and the decisions taken up to that point – which could (and often were) questioned and eventually revised. To address the expected effectiveness of the contributions every decision taken was exhaustively explained as to its criteria and assumptions.

To fulfill the research aim, 16 in-depth interviews were conducted, and the researcher professor’s field notes were analysed to generate the expected knowledge about the process. 

The Impact

As intended, flexible, customised strategic planning was carried out, involving heterogeneous participants in open participation and input from all. The process had constant transparency of the content under construction, and the decision was shared through mixed class/intervention meetings. After the completion of the project, Canto da Rua has already advanced in the legal definition, and different initiates under its umbrella have already achieved the following principal results:

• Inauguration of the Canto headquarters
• 1,928 individuals assisted
• Qualified listening to 358 homeless individuals by the ‘Streets Office’
• 472 people participated in dialogue circles where 64 hours were employed
• 882 individuals’ registrations in the Entrepreneurial Lives Programme
• 79 individuals participated in a total of 24 workshops
• 360 hours of training for different initiatives of solidarity economy (food service; cleaning products; ecological crafts; fabric reuse)
• 60 hours of training provided in a total of 10 courses to prepare students for their first employment
• 48 people assisted, 24 of whom are already living in the houses of the Housing First programme
• 48 individuals entered the formal job market

 

The best explanation of the success of the collective process was expressed by: Samuel Rodrigues – Coordinator National Movement of the Street People Minas Gerais “A bunch of people who thought different things, but who at a certain moment managed to align these ideas in the proposal to build something unprecedented aimed at a forgotten segment of the population, and we kind of materialised it in front of them: ‘this is going to work, this is going to work’.”

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