The Point of Encounter: Building Ecologies of Faith, Justice, and Collaboration

In a world aching for healing and change, The Point of Encounter (POE) stands as a radiant space where hope is practiced, not just preached. POE is more than an organization — a movement where people of different backgrounds, faiths, disciplines, and life experiences converge to imagine and co-create a better world. Founded on the belief that volunteerism, social imagination, justice design, and multicultural encounters can reshape society, POE invites us to think not only about what is possible but also about what is just, compassionate, and necessary.

In October 2024, POE brought this vision to Recife, Pernambuco, offering a week-long workshop on design thinking and human-centered design to five community-rooted social projects. The workshop created an immersive environment of collaboration, critical reflection, and creative problem-solving. Participants from grassroots initiatives across the region gathered to learn how to listen deeply, prototype boldly, and design programs grounded in the lived experiences and wisdom of their communities.

But the workshop was only the beginning. POE’s deeper goal was to cultivate ecologies of collaboration—networks of mutual support between faith-driven and justice-oriented initiatives. We envision these ecologies not as short-term partnerships, but as living systems of innovation and solidarity, where shared values and radical inclusion give birth to new solutions and new forms of community.

Over the past year, three of the five projects have made significant progress. Guided by the tools and relationships nurtured at the workshop, these teams have spent months co-developing grant proposals for their programs in conversation with those they serve and with stakeholders on the ground. These are not distant, top-down ideas. They are grassroots visions with roots in struggle and wings of hope.

Now, in the next phase of this journey, POE is mobilizing a new wave of volunteers to walk alongside these projects as they begin their first phase of implementation, from September 25 to October 4, 2025. Volunteers will serve as consultants, encouragers, facilitators, and bridge-builders, bringing experience and energy to a season of transition and transformation.

We invite you to support and engage with one of the three catalytic programs now entering their implementation stage:

• From Page to Stage: Empowering Vulnerable Children Through Literacy – This arts-based literacy initiative in Paudalho invites children to read Brazilian literature, write reinterpretive stories, and perform them on stage. It cultivates critical thinking, imagination, and belonging through storytelling and theater.
• Taste of Faith: Community Bakery for Economic Empowerment – This cooperative brings together women caregivers in Olinda to create and sell “party kits” with baked goods, generating sustainable income while building community and faith-centered entrepreneurship. The cooperative is an innovative design of “Aqui Tem Histórias,” a social project offering Bible stories as a catalyst for social change among children.
• Twenty-One Days to Change Your Life: A Women’s Holistic Health Program – Designed to uplift women’s bodies, minds, and spirits, this program offers a three-week journey of wellness, mental health care, spiritual reflection, and community support for women facing systemic barriers to health. Twenty-One Days is an innovative design of Kid’s Place, a social project offering after-school programs to vulnerable children.

Each of these projects is a seed, already planted, already nurtured—and now ready to grow. But they need hands, hearts, and voices to help them flourish. Whether you're a designer, educator, baker, nurse, listener, or organizer, your time, your skills, or your support can make a lasting impact.

Join us in this season of planting and tending. Volunteer, donate, or spread the word. Help build ecologies of faith and justice that don’t just talk about transformation—but live it.