Innovators/Innovations

Fernández, who speaks with the cadences and dropped consonants of his native Chile, grew up in the small, rural town of Rancagua. He began painting simply by graffiti-tagging buildings with the stylized letters of his name. At the University of Chile in Santiago, where he studied architecture, he explored the impact of art on urban spaces while experimenting with content, themes and style for his own art. “I became more in love with painting on the street than with being in class,” he recalls. In his fourth year he left university to experience art in other parts of the world, including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and eventually New York, where he moved in December 2009.

Fernández’ shift toward muralism that began during his student days intensified during his travels.  Although he maintains that “everything I paint and everything I know how to do in art is rooted in graffiti,” he also cites nineteenth and twentieth century artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky and Roberto Matta as his idols. Fernández prefers the medium of street art because it contains the “essential” quality of providing a space in which to connect with the public directly. Once, after a Chilean TV station distorted his remarks in an interview, he painted a graffito of a person with a lock on his mouth near his apartment in the heart of Santiago. The painting became a powerful and well-known protest of censorship, which Fernández never anticipated. “You never know what the consequence of your art may be,” he says. “Painting on the street carries great responsibility—both artistic and social.”

Fernández has brought that sense of responsibility to his work in the United States. A member of the New York-based Rebel Díaz Arts Collective—whom he affectionately calls his “family from the Bronx”—he helped paint a rooftop mural earlier this year to protest Arizona’s controversial anti-immigration law. Seventy feet long, the mural is dominated by giant yellow block letters that spell out the statement “No human being is illegal.” Interspersed among the letters are silhouetted human figures of all shapes and sizes, including a pregnant woman, a dancing child and an old man walking with a cane. “Our intent with the design was to restore humanity and respect” to the individual immigrant, explains Fernández.

His latest project, three years in the making, is a documentary film called Pan-American Graffiti and explores how art transcends borders. Fernández will travel for 100 days at the end of this year from New York to Santiago, painting 13 large-scale murals along the way. His goal is to document street art and build a pan-American art gallery and network. “It is a project for the long term,” he acknowledges, “but I believe I am laying the foundations for a community as I journey through this marvelous continent [which is]full of talent yet short on resources.”

Estela Villarreal’s mission is to improve the quality of life for those eight million people. She is the founder and director of Unidos Somos Iguales (United We Are Equal), a nonprofit organization that aims to better integrate people with disabilities into society by pairing them with non-disabled volunteers. In doing so, Unidos helps eliminate common misperceptions about disability. Founded in 1987 in Villarreal’s native Monterrey, Unidos now operates in 22 cities in five Mexican states and, she estimates, has indirectly or directly reached 200,000 people.

Villarreal knows the issue from firsthand experience. Two of her siblings suffered from mental retardation associated with Rubinstein-Taybi Syndrome, and their illness affected her entire family—particularly when they received comments or pointed looks from strangers. “Human beings are scared of what they don’t know,” she says.

Villarreal first tested her idea of encouraging interaction between disabled and non-disabled youth at a pilot summer camp when she was studying education in the 1980s. She found that stereotypes quickly disappeared once people understood their common humanity. While the quality of life for the disabled has improved in Mexico, thanks to medical developments and new laws that recognize rights of the disabled, Villarreal says the biggest challenge remains changing people’s attitudes. “Society expects physical solutions to disabilities,” she says, “but what we need is a cultural solution.”

To further that goal, Unidos has developed its original pilot project into a month-long summer camp in which 300 disabled and 300 non-disabled youth participate together in arts and crafts workshops, sports activities and field trips. During the year, approximately 3,000 Unidos volunteers, most of them aged 15 to 23, engage in monthly recreational activities with disabled young people, such as walking their dogs in the park, going to the movies or sharing a meal at a restaurant. And many have carried their interests into professional careers working with the disabled in rehabilitation centers or other occupations. The success of the program has inspired imitators elsewhere in Mexico. But Villa- rreal wants to expand her idea beyond Mexico’s borders and make it a global movement. “Disability is a universal issue,” she says. “People everywhere suffer from the same fear and the same stigma, and we’d like to change that wherever possible.”

Azzi launched the Institute in 2007 to help wealthy individuals support social causes. Traditionally, Azzi says, potential philanthropists have been reluctant to donate, finding Brazil’s NGO community “fragmented, unfocused, opportunistic, and lacking any measurement of impact.” Azzi’s institute helps to smooth those relations. Since its founding, Azzi and his four colleagues have directed over $1.14 million from 20 individual donors to 40 worthy organizations in São Paulo and the surrounding region. Among the grantees have been Liga Solidária (Solidarity League), a social services organization that works with 3,400 children, youth, adults, and seniors, and Habitat for Humanity Brasil, which builds affordable housing for low-income families.

Institute advisors begin working with investors by asking them to think of the donation as a percentage of their assets and to choose a specific social issue that matters to them personally. The Institute then helps each investor select a reputable, effective organization to receive the donation, monitors how the money is used until the project is complete, and measures the overall impact of the project on the community. The idea is to connect wealthy Brazilians to causes they care about, help them understand and calculate the nature of their gift and make the process transparent.

To be eligible for funding, each prospective grantee must pass a battery of tests assessing the organization’s accountability and effectiveness. The application begins with a screening questionnaire nearly 60 questions long on four aspects of organizational strength: quality of management, transparency, financial soundness, and potential impact. Only NGOs that score high on all four measures are invited to submit individual projects for evaluation and potential investment.

To ensure sustainability, Azzi is adamant that projects match investors’ interests and resources. Each project must fit its investor’s budget, clearly outline a spending plan and define the expected indicators of impact. The Institute also conducts regular field visits to NGO sites to ensure that projects move forward as planned.

Azzi says that in the last 10 years, government support and tax breaks for corporate donations have increased corporate giving to the nonprofit sector, but few incentives exist for individual philanthropy. “The result,” he explains, “is that individuals end up donating small amounts to people and organizations they know, but there’s no transparency and no clear results.” With the guidance and assurances of Instituto Azzi, that is beginning to change. Within five years, the Institute expects to manage $5.56 million in individual philanthropic donations, nearly a fivefold increase over 2010.

Today, Azzi pays the operating costs of the Institute out of the salary he earns as a fund manager at the investment bank Credit Suisse Hedging-Griffo. He will soon create an endowment for the Institute from those earnings as well.

Currently, Azzi does not charge donors fees for the Institute’s services, passing on 100 percent of the money granted to recipient organizations. Once a broader culture of philanthropy has been established, however, he believes he will begin charging clients.

In Brazil, where wealth has long been the measure of success, Azzi’s example is creating a new measure of status: giving back.

Villasana’s credibility comes from the fact that he has himself worked in government. He served as assistant to the mayor of his native city of Saltillo, and as sub-director in the Department of Social Participation at the Federal Ministry of Public Administration. His experiences at both ends of the spectrum taught Villasana that local governments must dedicate more effort to improving their efficiency and transparency so that federal institutions, in turn, can maintain their integrity and efficiency.

The Washington DC-based ICMA was founded in 1914 to establish best practices in local governance around the world. Among the programs directed by Villasana in Mexico is Sistema de Indicadores de Desempeño (System of Performance Indicators–SINDES), founded in 2001 and managed in collaboration with the Mexican Association of Municipalities. The program, which is funded by annual membership fees ranging from $2,500 to $4,000, helps municipalities establish performance indicators for accountability and evaluate their progress. The indicators are based on 76 criteria, ranging from the quality of public policy and financial information provided to the public to the quality of public services.

So far, just 47 Mexican municipalities have worked with the program. As Villasana concedes, many municipalities cannot afford membership, while others still don’t see the point. “It is very difficult to convince these governments to publicize their information,” Villasana explains. Nevertheless, he expects more members to join this year. Plans to extend the program to Argentina are also in the works.

The principal challenge faced by SINDES is sustainability. Due to the frequency of local elections and Mexico’s laws against consecutive re-election, there is a high turnover rate among members, making it difficult to create lasting change. But two programs in Chihuahua and Puebla have been successful. Unlike members who only temporarily adopt the SINDES measurement system, these two municipalities institutionalized their own system based on SINDES criteria and reports. In 2008, they scored highest among their peers in several evaluation categories: Chihuaha had the greatest level of investment in public-private partnerships for development (4.4 percent), and Puebla invested significantly more than other states in roadway maintenance ($4,142 per square foot [$385 per square meter]).

Villasana does not attribute the progress achieved in Puebla and Chihuahua solely to SINDES. Rather, he explains, “these changes must come from within.” To ensure a similarly organic process elsewhere, Villasana is constantly on the lookout for emerging leaders who understand the need to change the culture of local governance—people he calls “champions.” If Villasana has his way, there will be many more such champions around Latin America in years to come.