In accordance with the core values of responsibility, ethics and seriousness that underpin the business practices of Banco Votorantim and partner companies, and in step with the current stage of development reached by Brazil in corporate social responsibility, Associação Viver em Família para um Futuro Melhor was set up in December 2001. Projeto Viver is its first initiative.

Projeto Viver aims to promote the overall development of poor families so that they can achieve better lives. The integrated and sustainable development of the family is seen as the best way to reduce the social and economic problems experienced by poor communities.

Projeto Viver develops activities in collaboration with the beneficiaries, thus breaking with paternalism and top-down imposition of welfare programs, which do nothing to combat poverty at its roots. Families are registered and diagnosed in terms of needs, capabilities, priorities and problems. On that basis the volunteers who work for the project and the families jointly draw up a plan of activities aiming at the transformation of social reality.