TRANS STORIES BRASÍLIA: CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR ATTITUDINAL CHANGE THROUGH COMMUNITY-LED STORYTELLING
A beneficiary of our 2023/24 Community Impact Fund grant, TransStories Brasília is creating alternative opportunities for Trans women to gain meaningful employment in the travel sector by delivering guided walking tours — giving them a platform to share their stories and experiences with the world. A project developed by Jayni Gudka and the team at Sama Sama International, The Conscious Travel Foundation is delighted to be funding the early stages of this exciting new initiative. Here we speak to Jayni and the team at Casa Rosa in Brasília about the project and their plans for the future…
JAYNI GUDKA, SAMA SAMA INTERNATIONAL
Tell us a little bit about Sama Sama International and what made you decide to launch this new venture following the success of Unseen Tours?
Sama Sama International is a new Social Enterprise, with a purpose of creating synergies between people with experience of marginalisation, and the tourism, events and heritage industries. As an extension of the award-winning work being done by Unseen Tours in London over the past 13 years, where they have helped people with experience of homelessness to curate and lead their own walking tours of London, Sama Sama International has the goal to provide even more marginalised communities the opportunity to curate and take ownership of their walking tours.
The idea behind the Sama Sama approach is to help marginalised communities to create their own social-impact-led businesses in their locality. Through providing training on all things from tour curation, delivery, customer service, operations and sales, the idea is to enable communities to take ownership of their own tourism enterprises that not only provide a new source of income, but also allow them to curate authentic ways to experience their cities, providing a new perspective for locals and visitors alike.
How will you be transferring your learnings from Unseen Tours here in the UK to this new project out in Brasília?
TransStories Brasília is an extension of Unseen Tours’ business model, bringing a new unseen perspective for what travellers could learn during a visit to Brasília, whilst providing new training and employment opportunities for Trans women, and changing the negative public perceptions of the Trans community in Brazil. We will be transferring learnings about tour design, delivery, storytelling, route planning, community asset mapping, as well as general social enterprise development, taken from Unseen Tours and the Sama Sama research project into creating a new enterprise that is designed collaboratively with the Trans community in Brasília.
Tell us a little more about your partnership with Casa Rosa.
We're really excited about this new partnership with Casa Rosa, who are doing some brilliant work in outreach, public policy, training and employment and so much more for the LGBTQIA+ community in Brasília, and the enthusiasm shown by Pedro, Flavio and the team at Casa Rosa has been amazing!
Casa Rosa's work is vital in addressing the needs of LGBTQIA+ communities in Brasília, offering comprehensive support to help individuals lead safer, healthier, and more empowered lives. Their holistic approach not only addresses immediate needs but also works towards long-term societal change and inclusivity.
The idea for this specific project and indeed the introduction to Casa Rosa, came from a good friend of mine - Gustavo Pinto, who was keen to bring a project similar to Unseen Tours to his home country of Brazil. After more than 5 years of research and planning, we're really excited to be able to bring it to life over the next few years, and provide a new source of livelihood for the Trans community in Brasília and beyond.
How do you see this project intersecting with tourism in Brasília?
From all my conversations with people who are either from Brazil, or have visited Brazil, consensus seems to be that very few tourist experiences exist in Brasília, meaning that Brasília isn't really a big destination for domestic or international tourism - and yet it is an important hub for the Government, embassies, NGOs and so many organisations. We hope that this initiative will therefore be a very welcome addition to the city, and provide a unique experience and insight to the capital, and makes it the ideal location for this initial stage of the wider TransStories project.
Once TransStories Brasília is successfully and sustainably implemented in Brasília's Federal District, we will work with the first group of Trans Community tour guides to help them become peer trainers for other Trans Women in other parts of Brazil. Our aim is to make this an employment opportunity for Trans Women in all major tourist destinations in Brazil and beyond. A percentage of the revenue from the tours will be reserved for future training programs, ensuring that both graduates and trainers are adequately compensated during the project's future development beyond the initial three years.
What are the plans for year 1 of the grant?
Year 1 of the grant will focus on getting to know the city of Brasília, and the Trans Community that are being supported by Casa Rosa better. I'm really looking forward to spending a few weeks there in August / September, building more connections and partnerships that can help us deliver an even better training programme. We will be recruiting official tour guides as well as our Trans Community tour guides, and other members of the team that will be responsible for the sales and operations functions of the initiative, so that's set to be a really exciting month of connections and additional fundraising.
I will also be spending a lot of time researching and better understanding the type of marginalisation that the Trans Community experiences in Brasília so that I may adapt our training and community onboarding processes, as an important part of our Sama Sama methodology is to ensure that robust safeguarding measures are in place. With the consequence of being exposed to both physical and emotional harm being a major concern when working with marginalised communities, our training and community onboarding processes have risk assessments built in to ensure the safety of everyone we work with.
This will then lead to further training between April and June 2025, with a focus on route construction and storytelling, operational and marketing skills, and more.
It is expected that most, if not all, of these roles will be filled by members of the Trans Community currently supported by Casa Rosa, with additional support being provided by official tour guides, as per the legal requirements of tourism in Brazil.
CASA ROSA
Tell us about Casa Rosa and your work.
Casa Rosa, a social-assistance host institution for LGBTQIAP+ people in vulnerable situations, was founded by Marcos Tavares, current president of the institution, in 2018. The decision to create Casa Rosa was motivated by a series of Marcos' experiences as a cisgender gay man in contact, dialogue and coexistence with other LGBTQIAP+ people in different dimensions of life, from family to work.
Marcos founded Casa Rosa, not only to provide a roof for people expelled from their homes, and their communities on account of their gender identities and sexualities, but as an effective welcoming space in which interpersonal bonds that drive lives that LGBTQIAP+ people understand as worth living could be created and strengthened. A space in which to offer food security, education, social assistance, health, decent work and leisure.
Since its foundation, Casa Rosa has welcomed 42 LGBTQIAP+ adults in situations of social vulnerability. Most of these people lived there between 3 to 6 months and, at the time of reception, faced unemployment, besides having weakened socio-affective bonds.
In addition to hosting, Casa Rosa promotes employability and decent work for the LGBTQIAP+ population, of which the “Transformando Vidas” (Changing Lives) project is an example. In 2023 we also organised a Diversity Fair, the first of its kind in the area, with shows by LGBTQIAP+ artists and products sold by LGBTQIAP+ traders, with the purpose of further integrating Casa Rosa into the Sobradinho community.
What is the landscape like for the trans community in Brasília?
Life for the transgender community in Brasília, like in many other places in Brazil, is often challenging and marked by significant social, economic, and legal hurdles.
Most of the transgender women supported by Casa Rosa are slightly older, in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and the project is an opportunity for them to find other work oportunities rather than sex work. Most of them have dedicated a significant part of their lives to sex work, in which they were or are exposed to violence and don't have access to labour or social security rights. The project is also an opportunity for them to share their stories and experience through the walking tours, which we believe can also reduce cases of transphobia in the region.
Tell us about some of the hopes and plans you have for this partnership with Jayni and Sama Sama International?
We believe that the partnership with Jayni and Sama Sama International will be important for the development of Casa Rosa’s initiatives and achieving its goals, specifically those targeting transgender women struggling to access the formal labour market, facing prostitution as one of the only ways of surviving. Providing appropriate work opportunities for transgender women which value their knowledge and experience is certainly what Trans Stories will enable, besides representing another way of strengthening Casa Rosa’s community.
To find out more about Sama Sama International, visit their website. Or to learn more about the work of Casa Rosa, follow them on Instagram.
