Marist University awards scholarships to residents of Vila Torres, in Curitiba

The Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (Brasil Centro-Sul province) offers young people between 18 and 29 years of age, residents of Vila Torres, with a per capita income of less than 1.5 minimum wages in Brazil, the opportunity to access higher education with a full scholarship. The project created in 2019, through the Vice-Rectorate of Mission, Identity and Extension and the Directorate of Institutional Identity of the University expects to award 25 scholarships in five years. The second edition of the project recently concluded with the awarding of 5 scholarships to young people from the neighbourhood.

Vila Torres is a poor neighbourhood adjacent to the PUCPR campus in Curitiba. Some of the inhabitants of the area earn their income by recycling rubbish. Historically, there has always been a stigma attached to this community; the news portrayed it as a dangerous and violent place, which for a long time built an image that stigmatised its inhabitants and caused them to be excluded from opportunities.

The PUCPR, attentive to the emerging needs of the territory, seeks to work in a systemic and integrated way, promoting cooperation between the University and its neighbours, without closing its eyes to reality, but rather opening new paths for those who are close to the Institution. In this way it aims to strengthen the identity and expansionist character of the University as a transforming agent of the reality that surrounds it.

Follow this and other projects of the PUCPR’s Institutional Identity Department on the website: identidade.pucpr.br