“Literature is also a human right”
She was only 14 when she transformed her biggest passion into her life’s mission. Today, at 17 years old and recently selected as a young leader by Ashoka Young Changemakers, the student Luiza Fontes has been transforming lives through literature in her city – Belo Horizonte – and its surroundings.
Her love for reading began when Luiza was still a child, thanks to the encouragement of her mother, who “always wanted a daughter who was a reader.” As she grew older and became more aware of her surroundings, she noticed how her classmates did not have the habit of reading and how the library in her school was a devalued place. “Not many young people read, regardless of social status. But when you go to vulnerable communities, reading is almost minimal,” says Luiza, who found a very different reality from the one she was used to when she entered the IFMG.
It was during 9th grade that Luiza decided to act on the literary dormancy that surrounded her and founded, together with a classmate, the Por Um Mundo Melhor (For a Better World) project, which works, with the help of volunteers, in the democratization of reading in all spheres: they work with book donations, reading workshops, actions with refugees, community libraries, and even theater plays. “I began to realize that literature is not separate from the world’s problems. It has to do with poverty, social inequality, gender inequality, and race inequality,” says Luiza, who strives to approach readings that have a relationship with the readers in question. Today the project has more than 40 volunteers and, through collection campaigns, has already managed to donate more than 2,000 books to the project’s actions. “The literary habit is a little seed that we plant in every action of the project. We plant it little by little, so it is very much about constancy. One book leads to another, which leads to a passion for reading.”
“When you join LALA, you have a network of other people from different countries, and then you realize that you are not alone in the cause,” she says, explaining how LALA was crucial in her understanding of literature a social cause. Luiza participated in BLB9 and described that before LALA, “I was a girl full of ideas, but at the same time insecure. Who doesn’t really know what leadership is but has this desire to help others.” During the Bootcamp, she not only matured emotionally but also connected with her identity. “For me, LALA was very much for me to see myself as Latin American and think that I am part of a continent, and it speaks a lot about my history, which is something I had never thought about before,” she says, adding that she even started reading more Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende.
Besides her passion for reading, Luiza is also a writer, and recently she was the winner of a literary contest that gave her a chance to publish some of her poems in an anthology with other female authors. She wants to study literature in college and dreams of becoming a university professor in this field. “I can’t imagine my life being Por Um Mundo Melhor,” Luiza says, describing how she wants to make it grow on an institutional level so that the project “spreads this message of more humanized literature, getting away from this idea of literature as being just a mandatory academic subject.” We at LALA are proud and grateful to have someone like Luiza in our community and wish her future is as bright as yours.
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.
