Living goods is an “Avon-like” network of franchised community health promoters who provide health education and earn a living selling essential health products door-to-door at prices affordable to the poor.
Instituto Se Toque
Instituto Se Toque
Not-for-profit
Year launched: 2005Existing or expanding (post-pilot)
Target geography
Target Population
Target income level
- Bottom 20%
- Lower-middle income (20-40%)
- Middle-income (40-60%)
Health focus
- Family planning and reproductive health
- Noncommunicable disease(s)
- Primary care
Summary
Se Toque is a non-for-profit organization, funded in 2005. The institute has education as an instrument to build awareness, community mobilization to prevent diseases. The main focus of the institute is prevention and diagnosis of breast cancer.Program goals
The main goal of the organization is to increase the early diagnostics of breast cancer in women, promoting mammograms and other preventive techniques. The organization reaches women through their children. Young interns from the Institute go to public schools and teach children and adolescents about hygiene, sexuality and have them send invitations for mothers to visit local primary healthcare facilities for check-ups.
Key program components
The institute trains college students to provide lessons to public middle schools in poor neighborhoods in São Paulo about sexuality, prevention of sexual transmitted diseases and undesirable pregnancies, and breast cancer diagnosis. After these lectures participants take home a necklace to their mothers/grandmothers and a passport to book a mammogram in the neighborhood hospital. The necklace has beads of different sizes to teach women about lump sizes and help identify them during self-examination. The passport is a way to direct women to the local hospital, previously arranged by Se Toque.
Se Toque also reaches out to children of 4th and 5th grades through theater plays about health awareness and holds presentations at community centers for the adult public. Se Toque coordinates its work with hospitals to ensure that all the women who signed up for mammography will attend the appointments, or that there will be a follow up with the women who missed their appointments. The institute is partnering with the local Unidades Basicas de Saúde- UBS (Basic Health Units), training workers and linking them to the population and the hospitals.
Currently Se Toque has secured partnerships with Hospital Vila Nova Cachoeirinha, Hospital Oswado Cruz, and the School of Medicine of the University of São Paulo.
The works of the Institute covers one school per month, and has reached out to 25,000 people in 2010. The cost of the program, covering administrative expenses, two schools, for 6 months is estimated to be R$60,000.00 or US$34,400.00.
The organization is funded by private and institutional donors. Instituto Se Toque is currently planning the work of mobile units at the end of 2010. In 2010, Instituto Se Toque benefited 27753 people in the North and East regions of São Paulo. Of this total, 2746 women had access to mammograms organized by the institute.
Additional Information
Download the case study PDF about Instituto Se Toque
Scale
Financials
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