More than financial support, the support of the ABCD Charitable Trust is an investment in the dreams of people who are fighting for a better society.
Seeing these dreams come true is the return on our investment.
Founded in 2009, iABCD is a Brazilian non-profit institution dedicated to the cause of dyslexia. It works in three main areas: advocacy; specialized diagnosis and follow-up; and education.
Advocacy – working for better support from society and public policies. This led to the creation of a guidebook for parents with children with dyslexia, to help them in starting associations and support groups, as well as approval of Law No. 14,254/2021.
Diagnosis and care – through a call for proposals, ABCD selected five projects (four of them linked to public universities) to build into leading centers on specific learning disorders. This allowed already existing projects to undergo a process of professionalization and promotion.
Education (teachers): the Todos Aprendem project, executed in partnership with educational organizations and municipal and state departments of education, promoted continued training to public school teachers in 2014. The following year, the course moved into an online format, expanding its reach. In addition, iABCD created the online course “Understanding Dyslexia”, aimed at persons with dyslexia, family members, and those interested in the topic.
Education (students): given the high rate of functional illiteracy in the country, estimated at 30%, the iABCD expanded the idea of directly supporting the literacy of children with learning disabilities. In 2019, it launched EduEdu, a free app with personalized activities on phonological awareness, alphabetic writing and reading system.
Pandemic: During the Covid-19 pandemic, EduEdu became an important tool during remote teaching. In addition to activities for printing, iABCD invested in digital activities and in the Socioemotional Space (in partnership with the Ame Sua Mente Institute), also in 2020. The following year, EduEdu continued to expand digital activities and created, with funding from Cisco, the Dyslexia Space, which provides a test for signs of dyslexia developed in partnership with the Federal University of Rio Grande Norte (UFRN). Also during the first two years of the pandemic, iABCD launched two books on specific learning disorders aimed at education professionals, held a cycle of online lectures during Dyslexia Week and conducted the study “Profile of Specific Learning Disorder in Brazil: Costs for families and Impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic” with Cisco’s support. Already reaping results of its actions, iABCD now broadens its vision of helping ALL children with literacy difficulties, in the search to reduce the social, economic, and health barriers imposed on learning in Brazil
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As the first concrete action by the ABCD Institute, the Reference Centers Project aimed to produce, disseminate, and exchange knowledge about dyslexia in Brazil. To this end, it selected five centers (four linked to public universities) that offered diagnosis and care for persons with learning disabilities. In addition to developing a common multidisciplinary evaluation protocol and building bridges among these centers, the project provided financial incentive for the structuring of the services offered by the reference centers and for the development of research. Currently, iABCD includes on list the public a total of 12 centers (now called Centers of Excellence), located in the Southeast, Northeast and South of Brazil.
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Todos Aprendem was the focus of the second phase of the ABCD Institute, centered on continued training of Brazilian teachers. The project was the fruit of a partnership among specialists and researchers from the main learning centers. At this point, the training course was in-person, conducted through partnerships with other organizations in the educational area, with 41 municipal departments of education and with the state governments of São Paulo and Pará (with a student population of 240,000). In 2015, in partnership with the State Department of Education of São Paulo, the course migrated to an online format. This resulted in an expanded scope and a reduced cost of the project. With the Covid-19 pandemic and the challenges imposed on teachers by remote education, 6,379 teachers took the training, the highest number since the project began. In all, Todos Aprendem impacted more than 8,000 teachers.
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Launched in December 2019 by the ABCD Institute, EduEdu is an Android device app available for free to parents, guardians, and teachers of children with reading difficulties. Initially featuring personalized and printable activity sheets on phonological awareness, alphabetic writing system and reading, EduEdu updated its strategy only three months after its launch: with the arrival of Covid-19 and the challenges of online teaching of reading, especially for students with learning difficulties and disorders. In response, it incorporated digital activities and a Socioemotional Space, developed in partnership with the Ame Sua Mente Institute (also supported by the ABCD Charitable Trust). In just two months, more than 900,000 digital lessons were utilized by children from all over Brazil, at the direction of teachers and, mainly, parents and guardians. In 2021, a year marked by hybrid education, EduEdu continued to expand its digital activities and, in partnership with Cisco, launched the Dyslexia Space, which offers a rapid test to identify signs of dyslexia. The project was developed collaboratively with the company and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). Since its release, EduEdu has had more than 2 million downloads, and is recommended by nine out of 10 users, and has a 4.7 rating (out of 5) on the Google Play Store.
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The Ame Your Mind Institute is a non-governmental organization founded in 2018 by specialists and researchers affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry of the School of Medicine of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). Their objective is to explore how to promote mental health in the school environment while also contributing to the scientific and technical knowledge base in order to educate and raise awareness in Brazilian society. The ABCD Charitable Trust made a seed investment in 2018 to help create the institute.
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Continuing its partnership with the Ame Sua Mente Institute, which began in 2018 with seed investment, the ABCD Charitable Trust co-financed, together with the Umane Foundation, the Ame Sua Mente na Escola project, which promotes the training of educators from the public education network of the state of São Paulo in mental health, with the following objectives: promoting literacy in mental health; preventing mental disorders in youth; reducing the stigmas of diseases and mental disorders; and resolving mental health problems in the school environment. Between 2020 and 2021, more than 80 schools participated in the mental health training program, through a partnership with the São Paulo State Department of Education. After the course, 84% of the participants reported improvement in their ability to deal with mental health problems presented by students and 85% reported improved ability to refer identified cases.
In addition to financial support, the ABCD Charitable Trust promoted a partnership between the Ame Sua Mente Institute and the ABCD Institute, whose know-how acquired in the Todos Aprendem Continuing Education Project was crucial for Ame Sua Mente na Escola. The resources were also important for the launch of the Ame Sua Mente na Escola, which aims to foster a culture of mental health promotion, prevention and management in the school environment.
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Working since 2003 in the community of Paraisópolis, in São Paulo, the Instituto Pró-Saber SP aims to strengthen the full education of Brazilian children and young people through literacy and play. In 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic and the related shut-down of the organization’s physical location, the playful and pedagogical activities offered in the shift by the Pró Ler & Brincar program began to be carried out in virtual mode. However, the families felt the socio-emotional and financial impacts of the health crisis and isolation measures, which led Pró-Saber SP to channel part of its efforts into material support to them. The money given by the ABCD Charitable Trust was used for the monthly delivery of reading and play kits (with books, activities, drawing material, modeling mass, educational toys, etc.) and financial assistance to families.
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Following its donation to the Pro-Saber SP Institute in the first year of the pandemic, the ABCD Charitable Trust renewed its support in 2021. This time, Pró-Saber SP used the amount to maintain the organization’s routine upkeep in the community of Paraisópolis, including the work of the Pró Ler & Brincar Program and the Pró-Saber SP Library.
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Since 2016, the ABCD Charitable Trust has supported the Laboratory of Genetic Neurobiology, a research unit headed by psychiatrist, professor and researcher Russell L. Margolis, affiliated with the Division of Neurobiology of the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the United States.The ABCD Trust partially funds the innovative research strategy of the Margolis team, exploring some of the most difficult questions posed by schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases. As specific objectives, the laboratory’s work aims in the short term to discover mechanisms that can lead to neurological diseases and to develop treatment strategies for diseases caused by the mutation of a single gene studied by the group in the medium-term. Its long-range goal is to apply learnings from studying these relatively simpler diseases to more complicated disorders, such as schizophrenia. At the same time, the laboratory called on support from the ABCD Trust to advance its research on improving care to persons with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, as well to better understand these diseases for development of more effective interventions.
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Leveraging its relationship with researchers from both the Departments of Psychiatry of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the ABCD Charitable Trust has fostered collaboration between the two institutions. With this, it allowed the teams of researchers Jair Mari, Rodrigo Bressan and Ary Gadelha (Unifesp) to work with the Genetic Neurobiology Lab, JHU. Among the actions developed: presentations by researcher Russell L. Margolis (JHU) at the Schizophrenia Program Symposium 2017 of the Schizophrenia Program (PROESQ) and in the grand rounds of the Department of Psychiatry of Unifesp, in 2019; Bressan and Gadelha’s visit to JHU in 2019; one-month experience by residents Felipe Arcadepani and Bianca Camerini (Unifesp) at JHU; bressan and Gadelha presentation at the Psychiatric Research Seminar in 2021 at JHU; and presentation of the researcher Frederick Nucifora Jr. (JHU) at the webinar “Subtyping schizophrenia as an approach to precision medicine in psychiatry”, in 2021, and at the PROESQ Symposium in 2022.
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A leader in robotic surgery, the Brady Urological Institute, affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHU) in the United States, develops a pilot training and teaching program in the area. The work is overseen by Dr. Mohamad Ezzeddine Allaf, head of Urology at Johns Hopkins Hospital and professor at JHU. The ABCD Charitable Trust funds two scholarships in term of its support.
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The ABCD Charitable Trust funded 39% of the clinical trial conducted as part of Ph.D. research by Hugo Cogo-Moreira (Unifesp). The study was conducted in 10 schools, including intervention with students with reading difficulties selected through use of a standardized scale. In 2013, his work received an award for best thesis in Medicine, awarded by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes).
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The ABCD Charitable Trust made a seed investment for creation of the Goia Clinic, which provides mental health services to the population as support for the activities of the Center for Integrated Mental Health Care (CAISM Vila Mariana), in the Department of Psychiatry of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), in the state capital. The project, led by psychiatrist Jair Mari, professor and head of the Department of Psychiatry of the Paulista School of Medicine (Unifesp), brings together professionals affiliated with the institution who are specialized in innovative treatments for those mental disorders resistant to conventional treatment.
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Continuing its partnership with the Center for Integrated Mental Health Care (CAISM Vila Mariana), an assistance and research unit administered by the Department of Psychiatry of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), the ABCD Charitable Trust disbursed funds to remodeling of the location’s auditorium.
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The ABCD Charitable Trust invested in the creation Coruja Educação, assuming a 30% stake. A social enterprise whose objective was to promote specialized teaching, Coruja Educação developed a pedagogical methodology to support the learning of the Portuguese language and mathematics. This evaluation-based methodology provides a precise identification of a child’s stage in the learning process and the development of specific materials. After reaching thousands of students, mainly through association with Partners of Education and Pearson, the project was completed, and all material was transferred to the ABCD Institute, also funded by the ABCD Trust.
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