Instituto Elos is a Brazilian organization in Santos, state of São Paulo. It focuses on development and community-building through bottom-up and collaborative approaches.

We have spoken with Rodrigo about their work – their multi-week leadership course, Warriors Without Weapons (Guerreiros Sem Armas, in Portuguese), and in particular, their social technology for community building, Oasis Game (Jogo Oasis, in Portuguese). 

The following interview is edited for clarity.

Instituto Elos has hosted Warriors Without Weapons in Brazil for over two decades, training people from 58 countries. Through Oasis Games, you have engaged more than 1,000 communities worldwide. What are they about, and why are there two different programs?

Both of these programs are expressions of our philosophy. The goal is to awaken community members' creative, cooperative spirit, strengthen relationships, and cultivate a sense of belonging and responsibility.

Warriors Without Weapons is a year-long learning experience centered around a 28-day residential process in Brazil. We dive deep into participants’ individual development, personally and professionally. When they finish, participants enter a powerful network of warriors worldwide.

The Oasis Game is a four to seven-day event that invites a whole community to come together to recognize their potential, talents, and resources. We help them engage in dialogue to discover each others’ life stories and find common values; to identify a shared dream; to co-create a plan to bring that dream to life; and to cooperatively realize it with a spirit of joy and playfulness.

For the Oasis Games, you focus on identifying the assets in a community, rather than focusing just on what their needs are. Can you speak to that?

The starting point for all our programs is recognizing each other's potential.

When we gather a community together for the Oasis Games, we first ask everyone to look to their inner self and recognize all that is good and all that is beautiful. We can then start a relationship from the perspective of the potential each group member has to give.

This connection is made by finding common values. Affection is born when someone perceives that it has generated something positive in someone else. It is not about feeling powerful, but about recognizing someone else's power. Affection is essential to unite people because it is an attractive force that makes us want to be and do things together. 

A key element is affection, which is about suspending judgment and creating a caring environment before facing fear... Affection is born when someone perceives something positive in someone else. It is not about feeling powerful but about recognizing someone else's power. Affection is essential to unite people because it is an attractive force that makes us want to be and do things together.

Next, we ask the community to engage in a conversation about their dreams. What do we want to build together? In our society, we are overstimulated to develop personal dreams and understimulated to dream in the communal, social arena. There is an assumption that community efforts are very strenuous... 

Meanwhile, in the social sector, we tend to speak about what we don't want: a world without hunger, without violence… But without a common dream, we do not know what we want to build together when we are finished destroying or ending something.

We then move on to taking care of our dream. Looking at this utopic reality, which step can I take tomorrow? In just two days, we co-design a project and an action plan to make a community dream come true, gathering local talents and resources to make it happen.

We then materialize our plan, which happens in a few days, and we celebrate. Celebrating is an ancestral technology for cultivating communities. It is essential if we want to change preconceived ideas that prevent us from participating in collective spaces. 

Finally, we go back to our drawing board with our learned experience. Here, we solidify our strengths, identify challenges, and plan for future steps. 

Warriors Without Weapons and the Oasis Game work as a wake-up call to the beauty and the possibility of taking care of a common dream and of one another. Because it is experiential, the learning crosses mind, body, and soul and gets embedded in our beings. We can't deny it afterward because it becomes part of who we are.

This strikes me as very different from the traditional model of community-building, which is often driven from the top-down. We write a lot about the power dynamics in Brazilian philanthropy, and the inherent gap between donor and grantee – financial but also cultural and experiential. I’m curious, would you see potential in an Oasis Game that brings together donors and grantees?

Yes, for sure! At Elos, we see all the gains and potential of community members and place them in the center, working from there regardless of where they come from.

We don't see it as a shift of power, but a recognition of each human’s power. You don't have to give power to a community for them to have it. You just have to see and appreciate the power they have. 

Over many years, the social sector has produced enormous knowledge that is the fruit of lived experience, not just ideas, which to the donor means saving money. 

Communities are very good at optimizing resources; they have to. If the philanthropic field sees this knowledge as potential, it will be a turning point.

We also write about the rise of trust-based philanthropy - models of giving that are less restrictive and more flexible. Has Instituto Elos received trust-based funds? How does it feel?

We have. Elos has a few big individual donors who already deeply trust what we do and wait for us to tell them our plans with the money they give us.

Recently, we were funded by Imaginable Futures. After thorough due diligence and questions about our vision and our future, they came back to us and said that they were giving us unrestricted funds given our 20 years of work and accomplishments. We were not expecting it. It was an emotional moment for us.

But we like doing things in partnership with our funders or at least having them participate, bringing their feedback and learning together. Getting the money and doing nothing with the funder does not serve us either; we like the relationship, and it is a stimulus to us.

Another organization in which we have this quality of trust and collaboration is the Be The Earth Foundation. At the beginning of this year, they promoted a gathering with their community of grantees and even invited other grantmakers to participate. It was in a venue surrounded by nature, with a relaxed agenda focused on allowing fruitful connections among participants, connection with the environment, and even connection to oneself. That was a beautiful and powerful moment of learning, exchange, and building meaningful relationships that I believe has nurtured everyone present.

You’ve also told me that you’ve seen participatory models that go wrong because not enough intention was put into them.

We worked on a project with a housing organization in Seattle. There are many so-called participatory processes in this city, but I observe them as cold and mechanistic.

For instance, a question-answer process leads to a considerable amount of inconsistent information, and both those searching for participation and those participating by answering questions get frustrated.  We believe in involvement through relationships, which is a big difference.

When you ask a question about something, sometimes the person you are asking has never considered the subject and will give the first answer that comes to mind. I will give you an example.

A few years ago, we worked in the Rio Doce region after the dam broke in the city of Mariana, and a foundation asked us to help them form a Youth Council to advise the effort to regenerate an area of more than 40 cities impacted by the disaster. We told them that we couldn't just call the youth and ask them questions. We needed to create a process where they first get to know each other, connect, and understand the region's context after the dam break in order for it to be a true participatory process.

That is something the Oasis Game can offer: qualified participation.