This is PART II of the “Exploring Latin American contributions to education” series. All parts consist of a blog conversation and a video intervention. This part starts off with a conversation between Macarena and Mayara Floss.
If you haven’t read Part I and the introduction, start here.
Mayara Floss is a family and community doctor who graduated from the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) in Brazil. She is an activist dedicated to rural, indigenous, and planetary health in her country. In 2014, she received a scholarship from the Brazilian Government to participate in the Science Without Borders program at the University of Galway in Ireland. Mayara has developed various health education projects and was co-author of the Lancet Countdown policy brief recommendations for Brazil in 2018 and 2019. She also spoke on women’s health at the United Nations in 2018 and has a TED Talk titled “Why Rural Health?”. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at the University of São Paulo (USP) and works as a Family Doctor in a favela in Florianópolis, Brazil.
Mayara Floss, a family and community health doctor from Brazil, has been a key advocate for Planetary Health in her country. This health approach highlights the connections between climate change and people’s health, emphasising how heat waves, food crises, pollution, and biodiversity loss directly affect human health, especially among the poorest populations.
Inspired by Ailton Krenak and the indigenous communities of her country, Mayara wants people to reconnect with nature. Modernity has caused a separation from their environment, leading to problems of overconsumption and overexploitation that have disrupted ecosystems globally. She calls for rethinking the model of connection with the Earth and among human beings.
Although Planetary Health originated in the Global North through the Rockefeller Foundation, Mayara has contextualised it, taking into account the community in which it is applied. This is why her approach differs from the original, and she speaks of “planetaries” “healths”, recognising the different worldviews within the territory. For her, this recognition is fundamental, as the solution to the crises of capitalism and the environment is complex and collective, requiring the confluence of a plurality of wisdoms.
To achieve this, Mayara, along with a collective now comprising 60 people, created a free online course available to the public in both Portuguese and English. In four years, this project has achieved 10,000 enrollments and 1,500 certifications. Currently, the program is supported by the University of São Paulo, with which they facilitate a series of initiatives to promote Planetary Health in Latin America, pushing for an alternative model of well-being. Although much of the course content requires specialised knowledge, it has been designed so that anyone can access it, simplifying the language to eliminate hierarchies and barriers to learn.
The relationship with nature is a recurring principle in other projects Mayara is involved in. For example, through the Flourish project (‘projeto Florescer’), a group of patients meets twice a week to plant, transforming a parking lot into a garden and turning the health centre into a place of community and well-being.
Similarly, the questioning of top-down policies disconnected from local needs is evident in the Health Education League project (‘Liga de Educação em Saúde’). In this initiative, a team from the health centre engaged with the community to understand their primary health concerns and create an agenda aligned with what the community identified as important. They discovered that, rather than focusing on diabetes and thyroid issues as dictated by the centralised public policy, the community was more concerned about the violence in the area. As a result, they created a space for dialogue and listening for women experiencing violence, enabling collective learning in a meaningful and non-imposing way.
In this sense, Mayara conveys to me a holistic vision of health, where it acts as a bridge connecting with other rights and opportunities, such as education, culture and community, and where people are seen as human beings rather than just patients. Mayara then remarks that the aim of health professionals is the promotion of well-being. Therefore, a doctor should not only focus on treating diseases—otherwise, health centers should be called disease centers—but should instead care about the entire living conditions of people.
From this perspective, health professionals have an inescapable educational role and the responsibility to ensure that patients have autonomy over their health. However, what happens when a patient cannot read or write? Illiteracy is linked to precarious living conditions and a greater risk of limited access to both opportunities and rights. How could doctors ensure that the patient received the information? And given that the goal is to improve their quality of life, how could they ignore that the person can’t autonomously access the information? It then became evident to Mayara that returning to school is also a health issue, a project she is currently working on.
In conclusion, after meeting Mayara and hearing her experiences, I have established several key ideas. Firstly, I am inspired by her work and the teams she collaborates with, who, despite the state bureaucracy, have managed to launch innovative initiatives that are transforming lives from within the system, using popular education principles. Secondly, it has become very clear to me the importance of intersectoral policies and the need to build interdisciplinary projects. Living beings are multidimensional and interconnected across species and territories, and the notion that we are isolated entities or distinct categories only helps us to organise the complexity we are part of. However, in reality, the various parts are intertwined, from our cells to our organs, and on to the social and cosmic levels. Thirdly, the current challenge is to connect, dialogue, exchange and interweave, in equal conditions, unveiling the structures that block it. Lastly, transformation is not a number, instead it requires deep and honest conection with the territory and working for the dignity of all species.