There are forms of exclusion that can be seen immediately: a closed door, an inaccessible staircase, a place at the table deliberately left empty. Others are quieter and therefore more difficult to confront. They are built from hesitation, prejudice, fear, and the assumption that a person living with mental illness should remain at the margins of ordinary life—protected perhaps, assisted perhaps, but rarely entrusted with a visible and meaningful role within the community. The new “Sei Fazer +” program, created through a partnership between the Municipality of Angra do Heroísmo and the São João de Deus Institute, begins precisely by challenging that silence. Its purpose is not simply to provide an activity or fill the passing hours. It is to affirm that every person possesses abilities worth recognizing, a contribution worth receiving, and the right to participate in society not as an exception, but as a citizen.
The program will begin on August 10 and, in its first phase, integrate four participants into activities at the historic Jardim Duque da Terceira, under the coordination of the Municipality’s Environmental and Waste Management Unit. The location carries a meaning beyond convenience. A public garden is one of the most democratic spaces a city possesses: a place where generations meet, where residents and visitors cross paths, where the beauty of nature belongs to everyone. By welcoming participants into real tasks within this shared landscape, “Sei Fazer +” brings inclusion out of private rooms and specialized institutions and places it at the visible heart of community life.
The activities will be defined jointly by municipal services and the technical team of the Casa de Saúde São Rafael, taking into account the abilities, interests, and individual needs of each participant. That principle is essential. Genuine inclusion does not ask people to disappear into a standardized role. It begins by seeing the person before the diagnosis and by recognizing that autonomy grows when opportunities are adapted with intelligence, respect, and care. The project therefore does not measure success merely by attendance or by the completion of assigned tasks. Its deeper ambition is to strengthen personal, social, and functional skills while nurturing self-esteem, confidence, and a renewed sense of individual value.
For someone who has lived beneath the weight of stigma, the simple experience of being expected, trusted, and needed can become profoundly transformative. Work, in its broadest and most humane meaning, is not only a way to produce something. It structures time, creates relationships, confirms competence, and allows a person to recognize their own place in the collective world. To contribute to the maintenance and life of a garden, to participate alongside municipal workers, and to see one’s efforts become part of a space enjoyed by the entire city can restore something that prejudice frequently steals: the dignity of belonging.
The program forms part of Angra do Heroísmo’s broader strategy for equality of opportunity, social inclusion, and community cohesion. It is aligned with the Municipal Plan for Equality and Non-Discrimination, which identifies the fight against all forms of discrimination and the full participation of every person in community life as central priorities. Yet the value of “Sei Fazer +” lies in the fact that it moves those principles from policy language into lived reality. Equality becomes meaningful only when it takes the form of an open door, a carefully designed opportunity, sustained technical support, and a community willing to welcome the person who enters.
The initial agreement will remain in effect for one year and may be renewed following evaluation by the partner institutions. The Municipality will provide financial support to the São João de Deus Institute while ensuring the reception, integration, and continued accompaniment of participants throughout the program. This permanent support is one of the initiative’s most important foundations. Inclusion cannot be reduced to placement alone. It requires preparation, listening, adjustment, and the willingness to remain present when difficulties arise. The goal is not to create a symbolic moment for public celebration, but a responsible and sustainable pathway through which each participant can develop at an individual pace and with the security needed to succeed.
At the presentation of the agreement, Mayor Fátima Amorim described “Sei Fazer +” as an expression of the Municipality’s commitment to building a more inclusive community, one in which every person may participate actively in society and develop a life project with dignity. Her words point to a distinction that should guide all public policy in this field: people do not need only care; they need possibility. They do not need only protection from hardship; they need access to the experiences through which confidence, independence, and personal identity are strengthened.
“Inclusion is not achieved through words alone, but above all through the creation of concrete opportunities,” the mayor emphasized. That sentence contains the moral center of the initiative. Societies often speak generously about inclusion while preserving the structures that keep vulnerable people invisible. “Sei Fazer +” proposes another path. It recognizes that combating the stigma surrounding mental illness requires more than awareness campaigns. It requires shared workplaces, public participation, everyday contact, and the discovery—by participants and by the wider community—that diagnosis never exhausts the meaning of a human life.
The project is also an example of what becomes possible when institutions cooperate around the needs of people rather than the limits of their own responsibilities. The Municipality brings public spaces, organizational capacity, and civic commitment. The São João de Deus Institute and Casa de Saúde São Rafael contribute specialized knowledge, individualized accompaniment, and longstanding experience in mental healthcare. Together, they create a bridge between therapeutic support and community participation, between institutional care and the ordinary life of the city.
That bridge matters because recovery is rarely built in isolation. It grows through relationships, routines, responsibility, encouragement, and the experience of being seen beyond illness. A person may receive excellent clinical care and still remain excluded from the social world. Programs such as this one help close that distance by recognizing that mental health is also connected to purpose, autonomy, respect, and meaningful participation.
There is something quietly beautiful in the fact that this work will begin in a garden. Gardens are places of patience. Nothing grows through command or haste. Each plant requires different conditions, different care, different time. Some flourish in open sunlight; others need shelter. Some recover after difficult seasons when given the proper attention. The wisdom of a garden is that difference is not failure. Diversity is the very source of its beauty.
Perhaps “Sei Fazer +” asks the community of Angra do Heroísmo to cultivate the same understanding. Every person develops in a different way, carries different vulnerabilities, and possesses different strengths. A just society is not one that demands uniformity, but one that creates the conditions in which each life may grow with dignity.
The four participants who begin this journey in August represent only the first stage of the program. Yet meaningful change often begins on a small scale: four people, one garden, two institutions, and a city choosing to replace stigma with opportunity. Their work may appear modest within the vast responsibilities of municipal life, but its significance reaches far beyond the tasks themselves. Every day of participation will affirm that the community is stronger when it recognizes ability instead of limitation and opens spaces where people may contribute according to what they can do rather than being defined by what others assume they cannot.
No one should be reduced to an illness. No one should be condemned to invisibility by fear or misunderstanding. And no community can call itself fully inclusive while some of its members remain present only at its edges.
Through “Sei Fazer +,” Angra do Heroísmo offers a simple but powerful response: inclusion begins when society stops speaking merely on behalf of people and begins creating places beside them. It begins when assistance becomes trust, when protection becomes participation, and when every person is allowed to say, with confidence and without apology: I know how to do this. I can contribute. I belong here.
Based on a Press Release–Photo from the Municipality of Angra do Heroísmo