“For me, leadership is putting yourself at the service of people.”

Do you ever feel outside the educational standard of the majority around you? Isn’t it wonderful when we have contact with an education that, above all, values ​​human beings and their relationships, as in LALA? Nicolle Squillante, LALA alumni, also think that way, which led her to develop the Educaree method. At 20 years of age, she seeks to impact the lives of young people through a transformative and unconventional educational method.

Nicolle lives in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina (South of Brazil), and participated in BLB6 in 2019 when he was 18. She got to know LALA through social media and was encouraged by a friend of a project she was working on to apply. She says that the program helped her to awaken to the importance of self-care and to understand the importance of being vulnerable and sharing her story, which she previously felt insecure about doing.

A few years ago, Nicolle planned to study abroad and was in the process of applying. But often things don’t go as planned and, in this case, perhaps an unexpected and unwanted result, led her to something much better: “Modifying” this dream (which, according to her, was another means to a bigger dream than an end in itself) Nicolle woke up to the creation of a method that made sense to her, who had decided not to go to college anymore. While she felt a little sad about the change in plans, she also says that she felt even more enthusiastic and courageous to go after what she believed. Developing 5 pillars that she saw as essential in a good education (self-knowledge, knowledge, experience, externalization, and connection), this method stopped being something for my own use and was born as a social project (and later a social business) to help others.

Together with her friend Gabriel, she created this method that works through activities such as workshops and mentorships and has as one of her biggest dreams the creation of a network of schools in the future. They defend an education based on unconditional love, and each pillar aims to develop a type of love: self-love (through self-knowledge), love for learning, and love for the world (externalization). “At Educaree, we believe that the objective of education is to provide full development.”

Nicolle believes that the basis for finding your purpose is self-knowledge, through which we can have autonomy in our learning. “It’s hard to think about bigger changes if we can’t start on our own.” She attributes to LALA the vision of leadership today, very different from what she had before “For me, leadership is putting yourself at the service of people.”

One of Educaree’s biggest dreams is to partner with host institutions and have a network of schools, but much more than that: to create a network of spaces where people learn to love unconditionally and are loved, says Nicolle. For her, “Working at Educaree is like making a dream come true every day.”

LALA is happy to know that, in some way, it was able to influence and contribute to the growth of our alumni, Nicolle Squillante. Their ideas and projects inspire and will continue to inspire many others.

These stories are written and edited by the Storytelling Team, an alumni-lead team that collects stories with the objective of recognizing and celebrating the wonderful work that volunteers, staff, and alumni do for LALA and also showing how the organization has impacted their life.