LALA is not an environment. LALA is not an institute. LALA is the people who are there. We are LALA.

Curious. Wild. Authentic. Courageous. Who is the first person that comes to your mind with these characteristics? If you, dear reader, thought of Ingrid Pereira, congratulations, you got it right. Ingrid Pereira, or Dear Being Ingrid, as she likes to be called, is a young trailblazer who grew up in a small town in the countryside of Alagoas, Brazil, called Santana do Ipanema. She has been transforming the way many people see education – her area of cause -and even life, advocating a way of living by investigating, exploring, and contemplating what surrounds her.

“Whether it’s in the area of my cause, whether it’s when I’m talking to someone, whether it’s when I meet someone again who I met there in the past, whether it’s when I’m studying about something, I’m all the time unraveling the existence, so that’s the key point for me,” she says. Besides this beautiful way of looking at life, Ingrid also believes it is fundamental to see others not only as “names and ages,” but as beings, who have a human construction and experiences different from her own, ready to be shared.

Her passion for exploring existence was one of the reasons she developed her own community called “Caros Seres.” Through this, since 2018, Ingrid has been available to give lectures throughout her state, as well as meetings with young leaders and people of any age who have not yet had the opportunity to unravel their existence.

Currently, she has been directed to the educational area in search of re-education of humanity and the construction of safe spaces for development. Her mission is to stimulate the growth of human beings who are more questioning, conscious, responsible, and pioneers of their own existence through this look at their human construction.

To make this increasingly a reality, she is also part of a learning community of almost 10,000 educators in all. Called “Tiro na Lua Educação,” the group attends cities, state, and municipal schools in the state of Alagoas, where it is directing one of its educational marathons.

“For me, education is not about forming a group and dividing the people who go to school and those who don’t have the opportunity to go to school. I think that the people who have the opportunity to have access to education have a very big responsibility because it is a return for that society that could not be there in that space,” says Ingrid when talking about the importance of studying at the Federal Institute of Alagoas had for her. It was there that she had her first experiences with teaching projects, extension, and research projects, and she could see how education should really work. “At IFAL, they stopped questioning me about what I wanted to be and started to value what I had to offer.”

“I lived in a world where I didn’t feel present, I didn’t feel ‘me’ at school, I had no personality… But when I got home, I questioned, and explored all the things.”

Explains Ingrid about how she lived in a social bubble, which was only broken with her arrival at the Federal Institute, where she really began her journey of exploration. Despite this, she missed connecting with young people her own age since most of the events she attended were made up of adults. Then a friend of hers introduced her to LALA.

“Something I learned there is that LALA tries to recognize the most diverse leaderships, and that gave me a lot of room to bring even more of my personality and my way of developing leadership,” said Ingrid about what motivated her to apply to the bootcamp. Still, about her experience in the program, she comments on the questions surrounding her, mainly about “what is the social impact.” After the program, she realized that social impact goes beyond big initiatives or how many people your project impacts, “it’s something that comes from inside and overflows on the outside.”

Commenting on what she learned during the bootcamp, Ingrid says that “it was a preparation, a time for us to recharge and get what we need to go home.” Ingrid Pereira is one of our amazing alumni whom we have the opportunity to share her story with. The LALA community is extremely grateful to have her as part of our family. All her effort, dedication, and originality are seen and appreciated by everyone in the community. Thank you, dear being, for sharing with us a little bit of your story and your heart.

These stories are written and edited by the Storytelling Team, an alumni-lead team that collects stories with the objective of recognizing and celebrating the wonderful work that volunteers, staff, and alumni do for LALA and also showing how the organization has impacted their life.