Alumni Impact: Uniting Women for Health in Brazil
Alumni Impact is a social media campaign that recognizes the excellent work being done by FIUTS alumni all around the world. This week, meet Mariana Lemes Diamanto and Mariana Manso from Brazil!
Mariana Lemes Diamantino (above) and Mariana Manso
My name is Mariana Lemes Diamantino, and I am 21 years old. I am from São Paulo - Brazil, and I am a physiotherapy student.
I’m Mariana Manso, I’m 20 years old and I am a biology student. We participated in the FIUTS SUSI on Education and the Future of Work, representing Brazil, in 2021.
During the online part of the program, we learned so much about how to become a leader that creates impact in their community and how to create and plan an event for our society. SUSI was extremely important to us because we started to actually think as leaders and the things we could do to attract our community to talk about so many important subjects, specially gender equality and women leadership.
With SUSI, we had the opportunity to listen to our friends' experiences and perspectives, and also share ours as two brazilian women. The multicultural environment provided by SUSI helped us to extend our horizons and to think outside our country. Another important fact is that we got closer to the U.S. Embassy in Brazil, which helped us so much with our event, and they supported us since day one of our project.
SUSI is an incredible experience to create marvelous networking and to become the best versions of leaders someone can be. We are extremely grateful for every person we met during SUSI because we carry their perspectives within us, and we couldn’t ask for a better opportunity than SUSI to get to know such fantastic people.
Together in real life!
Now talking about our organization, our project idea started when we both read an article saying that, even though women are majority in health courses (such as medicine, nursery and dentistry), they are still minority in leadership positions related to this area. Because of that, we related to the issues we usually see in both of our communities: sexism and consequently female insecurity, low self-esteem, lack of encouragement, triple journey: career, motherhood and house management. With these issues, we face a community full of undervalued positions, lack of professional perspective, lower soft skills' development, lack of representativity and gender wage gap.
Therefore, we created an organization called United Women in Health (UWH), an organization that has the goal to inspire women leaders to be the best version of themselves and to pursue and to achieve bigger dreams through our events and courses. Also, we want to discuss the importance of women in leadership positions within the health field in Brazil, instigate and encourage women to achieve new experiences and to develop soft skills through our project.
Leading an online event
We have already organized an event named “I Meeting of Women Leaders in the Health Field”, in which we invited 6 women to talk about their experiences as leaders in three different days. In 1 month after the creation of our organization, we had 175 participants, and we received almost 600 views during the event. It was an amazing opportunity because we brought knowledge to people from all around Brazil! It was an online, open event and for free! One of the things UWH really believes is that we already have innumerous obstacles and differences between people who can afford education or have access to information and opportunities related to leadership and people that do not have these chances. For this reason, we plan on organizing our future events for free, because we want to give the same opportunity to every woman who wants to impact their community and become a successful leader or professional.
Publicity material for United Women in Health
We created an Instagram account: @unwhealth and our live events are available on our YouTube channel: United Women in Health. We’d like to thank FIUTS, Meridian International Center, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassies in Brazil for believing in us and for supporting us. We hope to meet everyone we met during the online SUSI part in person next year!
SUSI programs promote a better understanding of the people, institutions, and culture of the United States among international students, teachers, and scholars. Study of the U.S. Institutes (SUSIs) are short-term academic programs for groups of undergraduate leaders, educators, and scholars from around the world. Hosted by academic institutions throughout the United States, these 5- to 6-week Institutes include an intensive academic residency and an integrated educational study tour. Extracurricular cultural and community activities help to broaden the participants’ understanding of U.S. society. Learn more about SUSI programs here.
Guest posts on the FIUTS blog represent the experiences and views of individual writers. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FIUTS or any organizations or institutions affiliated with our programs.