The Space to: Explore

The BRICS Initiative

The 2014 summer travel component of the BRICS Initiative will be a two-week visit to Rio de Janeiro and Salvador during June 2-15. The travel dates are subject to change, but will occur in June. 

Your on-the-ground experience in Brazil is your chance to navigate the BRICS landscape with expert guides and mentors. The two-week in-country experience will push you to apply your knowledge to a new setting. It'll invite you to see how your liberal arts education can kick into action to help you interpret experiences, confront challenges, identify opportunities, and grow as a person.  

And what could be more awesome than to do that among your BRICS peers in such an amazing place?

Here's what the trip will include:

• A real-time, 24/7, daily crash course in cultural geography: who lives, works, worships, studies, and dances where, why … and with whom.
• An up-close look at the supply chain: how goods get from A to Z, from agricultural markets to ports to transit lines, and why you should care.
• A zoom-in view on social challenges: how the problem of inequality looks for those at the low end of those income charts and how creative people work daily to turn challenge into opportunity, for more.
• Walk-through visits of Brazilian-owned and American multinational companies: how business gets practiced and why it's booming in Brazil.
• De-briefings, problem-solving, seminar discussions, and strategy sessions with project mentors Dillenger & Barbas-Rhoden, with guest visits from experts based in Rio and Bahia.  

What about the cities? 

We've chosen Rio de Janeiro because it's complex, beautiful, and, for many, synonymous with Brazil. Rio served as the capital city for Brazil for nearly two centuries. Powerful Brazilian companies like Petrobras and Globo have their headquarters in Rio, and the city has an active sector of telecommunications, arts, and sciences, as well as top-notch universities. Rio is also home to sprawling slums, or favelas, such as Rocinha and Cidade de Deus, and to social projects that aim to include favela residents in a more inclusive, prosperous Brazil of the future. And finally, if Rio was on the world scene before now —for lots of good reasons— we bet its profile will only grow as the city prepares to host the world at the 2016 Olympics.

From Rio to Bahia…Salvador is the capital of Bahia state, the Afro-Brazilian heartland on the northeast coast of the country. Salvador is a great place to begin to grasp the complexity of Brazil, to feel a different pulse of life in what was the wealthy, beautiful, and booming early colonial capital of Brazil. One of the oldest cities in the Americas, Salvador was the port of entry for more than a million African slaves whose labor underwrote the sugar, tobacco, and gold economies of the past. In Salvador we'll deepen and broaden our sense of Brazil as a BRICS nation and consider how economies, places, and peoples rise and fall, adapt and change…how Bahia went from sugar capital to cacao capital to the automotive, petrochemical, and tourist center it is today.  

And we promise: you'll hear drumbeats on the streets, and they'll invite you to follow Brazil into the future. Your future.