This brings us to the following questions: what promotes the awareness of who we are?

How can we experience dignity again? How can we overcome poverty?

Experience shows that several elements are crucial in this pathway, we must:

 be part of a family and a community that recognize the value of the person;
 be able to contribute to the construction of something with our own skills and
work;
 have an ideal for which it is worthy to live — an ideal of beauty, justice, truth
and/or love.

The basic material conditions to achieve this are:

 access to good quality education, health, nutrition and housing;

 ability to express our religious experience freely;
 ability to constitute groups and associations;
 protection from all sorts of violence.

In order to guide collective human development, it is necessary:

1. The promotion and development of local social network supporting the creation
and existence of local businesses, social interventions, communitarian
associations, schools etc., that should be rooted in the local culture and
traditions, while at the same time promoting the common good of those
communities.
2. The elimination or at least control of mechanisms that rob community wealth,
such as corruption and financial use of capital by persons that do not own the
capital itself.

Innovative ideas and approaches that will lead us to a meaningful change in our world
today are ones that are locally rooted and are successful in promoting common good
and constructing and strengthening local communities. This coming year, it is hope that
leads me to Davos — hope that the strategy to construct a global alliance can be found,
where all are involved in the aim to ensure that everyone has enough to live, always,
where “enough to live” considers all the human needs that are far more than the basics.
I am hopeful to find stakeholders and potential partners that want to construct this global
movement that will lead us to fight against the suffering originated from poverty.

This article is published in collaboration with Medium.

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Author: Gisela Bernardes Solymos is the General Manager of CREN (Centre of

Nutritional Recovery and Education).
Image: Residents are seen in the Villa 31 slum, which censuses show has grown 50
percent in the past four years to currently house some 40,000 people, near the 100-
year-old railway station Retiro in the heart of Buenos Aires, February 9, 2014.
REUTERS/Enrique Marcarian.