“I think the world is totally divided between before LALA and after LALA… at least my world.”
Laura Silveira is a 17-year-old student who lives in Brasilia, in the Midwest of Brazil. She was one of the participants of VLB5 in February this year and is now part of the LALA Storytelling team. The student is passionate about education and the arts.
Laura has been engaged in Model UNs from an early age, and in 2020 she had the opportunity to mediate the delegates’ debate in an online simulation, which led her to meet Leonardo, one of LALA’s alumni and volunteers. He was the one who introduced her to the program and encouraged her to apply. “I think the world is totally divided between before LALA and after LALA… at least my world,” says Laura, as she emphasizes how important this experience was in her life. The student also tells us how the Bootcamp helped her get her ideas off the paper, deepened her self-knowledge, and gave her the opportunity to meet amazing people. It was even in one of the “breakout rooms” during the program that she met Maria Alice, with whom she later had the idea of creating the Edushare Project, which has the objective of connecting people who are passionate about education: “There are projects that want to change the system, Edushare wants to connect people who want to change the system.”
Education is one of her main interests, more specifically, the subject of child development: “If you provide a child with legitimate child development, with room for creativity for them to express themselves, to learn about themselves, you will have much more evolved adults and adolescents.” But this is not her only passion: Laura is also passionate about the arts, movies, and books, which even led her to create a channel on Youtube called “Simplesmente Laura.” This interest in the arts has always been very present for her due to her family’s influence: as the daughter of journalist parents, Laura has had contact with this world from an early age.
Establishing a connection among her passions, she says that “art today in Brazil, regardless of the type, is very elitist, not everyone has access to the cinema, not everyone has access to an exhibition, so education can also be a means of bringing art to these people.” One of her great dreams is to create a cinema workshop for the most underprivileged people who don’t have access to these opportunities.
For Laura, being a leader is not about simply leading a group – as many people think and as she herself thought – but about putting herself in the other person’s shoes and being vulnerable. She recalls a meditation moment she experienced during V-Camp, where it was the first time she could have that experience, and many people demonstrated so simply and powerfully vulnerability. For her, it was the most striking moment, and it will forever remain in her memory. “It was the first time I was able to connect with the inner self that I had lost for a while,” says Laura.
One of Laura’s main wishes is to be able to touch people’s lives in some way and help them in their development. LALA is grateful for her contribution to our Storytelling team. We know she has a bright future ahead of her, and we hope to follow the growth of her projects and ideas, which will surely touch many people’s lives!
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.
