Day 2: Sao Paulo Symphony, World Vision Brazil, and Dr. Marcos Kisil

Sao Paulo Symphony Hall

      Today was our first day of site visits. We began in the morning with a visit to the Symphonic Orchestra of the State of Sao Paulo. An alumna of North Park’s School of Music who also took courses in Nonprofit Management, Deborah Wanderley dos Santos, is violinist in the orchestra and arranged for a full morning of activities. Our bus dropped off at the Symphony Hall which was originally the Sao Paulo train station and later housed the trading floor for the Brazilian coffee brokers. 
     Our first meeting was with the Executive Director, Marcelo Lopes. We were very impressed with the dynamic and yet humble leader. He began with the orchestra as a trumpet player at the age of 19. He was simultaneously a university student majoring in Economics. He continued to play in the orchestra while going on for masters’ degrees in both administration and law. This placed the young trumpet player in an ideal position to assume management roles within the symphony organization. He rose quickly in the ranks to become executive director. Marcelo has stewarded this public orchestra

Marcelo Lopes

from hard times, when he took over, to a thriving position as the premier symphony orchestra in South America. They have 108 full time musicians and offer 90 concerts a year. The have recorded all of Prokofiev’s Symphonies the full orchestral works of Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 – 1959), the premier Brazilian composer. These recordings have achieved excellent reviews around the world. Marcel Lopes is dedicated to growing the prestige of this orchestra through excellent training and recruiting. He has sought and built partnerships with orchestras throughout the region in Argentina and Uruguay to name just two. Under his deft leadership, they have a youth symphony, three choral groups, and an educational program for the youth that blew us away. Over 900,000 young people have attended and been exposed to the various concerts and events provided the Sao Paulo Symphony which Marcelo Lopes modeled after the youth events the Leonard Bernstein began with the New

Stained Glass in what was the coffee trading floor

York Philharmonic.
     After a quick lunch, we headed over to World Vision Brazil. We were not really sure what to expect there. The office was hard to find and quite humble when we walked in. There was a bullpen full of multiple big screen computers and slew of young people working away. Ana Beatriz, Raniere Pontes, and Stella Vaz presented their story to us. Their presentation started kind of slow and was a bit confusing. They talked about their old model and losing funding from the global organization for a variety of reasons and thus a need to create a new model. And create a new model they did. Necessity was truly the mother of invention for them. We were impressed and invigorated as how this intrepid team took their old model that appealed to the baby boomer and older generations for decades and created a modern social media model that was aimed to engaged millennials. In turns out that the bullpen of computers and activity we saw when we walked in was where it was all happening. They have made an amazing transformation in just six months and are putting their office on firm financial footing. Furthermore, they are becoming a model of excellence within World Vision worldwide. We were blown away as evidenced by the engaging discussion we had with them that lasted an hour beyond our scheduled time.
     Our Dean, Wes Lindahl, was at a fundraising conference in 2017. While there, he met Ader Assis of Assis e Lang a consulting firm based in Sao Paulo specializing in the Nonprofit sector based in Sao Paulo. When Dean Lindahl told Ader that we were thinking of visiting Sao Paulo for our 2018 International Experience, Ader immediately offered to help set up some visits. Ader and Thiago Masagardi of the firm set us up for half of our visits on this trip including World Vision and a visit to the Ader e Lang offices which will take place on Day 2 of our site visits.
     As a topper to our day, Ader and Thiago arranged a dinner with Dr. Marcos Kisil. There is no better way to introduce Dr. Kisil than to include the biography that Thiago and Ader

Dr. Marcos Kisil

sent us:

Dr. Kisil is a medical doctor, currently serving as consultant and Professor of University of São Paulo. Dr. Kisil has made a major contribution to the Nonprofit sector in Latin America and lately to the Brazilian market. He was the former Kellogg Foundation representative for the region. With the support of the Kellogg Foundation and his own family resources, he started a new organization, Instituto de Desenvolvimento do Investimento Social - www.idis.org.br, in 1999. The goal of IDIS is to promote philanthropy endeavors in Brazil. His first initiatives were to support philanthropists and social investors to form an organizational structure and governance that would align their ‘family office’ goals with the goals of the community interested in the Private Social Investment and Philanthropic efforts.

     Dr. Kisil regaled us the story of how he went from a doctor of internal medicine to a world renown leader and expert on social responsibility, philanthropy, nonprofit management, and NGO management. He further shared with us the history of social responsibility and social entrepreneurship Brazil and where he sees it heading.
     What a great way to start our site visits!