A partnership between Olhar Poente and the São Bartolomeu dos Regatos Parish Council transforms a former primary school into a new community space for approximately 40 children, supporting families while strengthening belonging, learning and local life
Sometimes a community grows stronger not by constructing something entirely new, but by giving an old place a new reason to live. In São Bartolomeu dos Regatos, on Terceira Island, the rooms of a former primary school will once again be filled with children’s voices. On August 30, Olhar Poente – Associação em Desenvolvimento and the São Bartolomeu dos Regatos Parish Council inaugurated a new Leisure-Time Activities Center (CATL), creating a local social response for children and families from the parish and surrounding communities. With two rooms and capacity for approximately 40 children, the center will provide care after school while offering opportunities for learning, creativity, socialization, autonomy and participation. It is, in its simplest form, a place for children to go when the school day ends. Yet its purpose reaches considerably further: to allow childhood to remain connected to family, neighborhood, friends and the familiar geography in which belonging first takes root.
The project began with a challenge from the President of the São Bartolomeu dos Regatos Parish Council to Olhar Poente, responding to an identified need among families who lacked an adequate nearby option after school hours. For Sandra Serpa, President of Olhar Poente, the partnership embodies the organization’s central mission: “To be where we are needed.” She described the initiative as the result of a very concrete reality—children and families in São Bartolomeu and neighboring parishes who needed a closer response once the school day was over. Rather than requiring families to adapt themselves to services located elsewhere, the new CATL brings the service into the community itself.
Growing Up Without Leaving the Community
That emphasis on proximity gives the center a dimension extending beyond childcare. Olhar Poente views the CATL as an instrument of local development, allowing children to remain near their families, school, friends and community references. “Keeping a child in their parish is not merely ensuring that they remain closer to home,” Serpa explained. “It is allowing them to grow connected to the place where they live, creating fundamental bonds and developing a sense of belonging.”
There is something particularly important in that idea for small island communities. A child develops not only within a household or classroom but through an entire landscape of relationships—the street that becomes familiar, the adults who know the family, the friendships formed nearby and the places that gradually become part of memory. Olhar Poente therefore advocates close cooperation among the CATL, schools, families and the wider community, recognizing that no single institution encompasses the whole life of a child. “When we speak about a child, we are always speaking about many dimensions of their life,” Serpa said. “And the better we are able to work together, the more complete the response we can provide.”
The inauguration brought together the Parish Council executive, Angra do Heroísmo Mayor Fátima Amorim, accompanied by the municipal councilor responsible for Social Action, Culture and Animal Welfare, and Márcio Filipe Meneses Rocha, Chief of Staff of the Regional Secretariat for Health and Social Security, representing Regional Secretary Mónica Reis Simões Seidi. Members of Olhar Poente’s leadership and staff joined families and, most importantly, the children themselves in marking the beginning of the new service.
“This Space Is Yours”
It was to the children that Sandra Serpa reserved some of the ceremony’s most memorable words. Buildings, after all, do not create communities merely because their doors have opened. People do.
“This space is yours. You are the ones who will give it life. It will be your voices, your games, your questions, your discoveries and even your little disagreements that will transform these walls into a true home.”
The words acquire additional resonance because these particular walls already possess a history of childhood. Once a primary school, the building returns to children in another form. Desks and lessons may have given way to a different kind of activity, but the essential purpose remains recognizable: a place where young lives encounter one another and where some portion of growing up takes place.
Serpa expressed the hope that years from now, when today’s children have become adults, they will be able to return in memory to these rooms and say simply: “I grew up here.”
That may ultimately be the most meaningful ambition of the new CATL. Social policy is often described through capacity, services, budgets and institutional partnerships, all of which matter. Yet successful community intervention eventually becomes something far less bureaucratic: a parent knowing that a child is safe after school; a friendship beginning across a table; homework completed with encouragement; a game played in the afternoon; a child discovering something about the world—or about themselves—without having to leave the community to which they belong.
An Old School, a New Beginning
The project also demonstrates what can happen when different levels of community life cooperate: the proximity and local knowledge of a parish council, the experience and social mission of Olhar Poente, the work of professionals and the confidence of families. The association has reaffirmed its commitment to developing further community-based responses through partnerships with local institutions, placing people—and particularly children—at the center of its work.
“Today we open a door,” Serpa said. “I hope that, from now on, through that door will come many children, stories, laughter, learning, friendships and many dreams.”
There could hardly be a more fitting image for the reopening of an old primary school. Buildings have memories, but they can also be given second lives. A room that once heard generations reciting lessons can hear children laughing again. A school that belonged to yesterday can become a place of care for today and possibility for tomorrow.
And perhaps that is how communities endure: not simply by preserving their buildings, but by continually finding ways to place life back inside them.
In São Bartolomeu dos Regatos, an old school has opened its doors once more. And if, years from now, even some of the children who enter them today can look back and say, “I grew up here,” then those walls will have become much more than a center for after-school activities. They will have become part of home.
Based on a Press release from Olhar Ponete–Photos also from Olhar Poente.