Renata Rizzi
Nationality: Brazil
Organization Name: Utopiar
Impact Region: South America
About the Social Business: Utopiar is a sustainable fashion brand, which helps women to overcome domestic abuse in Brazil.
About the Y&Y Fellow: Renata was born in São Paulo, in a very multicultural family. She has always loved to hear people’s stories and learn from them, which led her to join CISV (a global organization dedicated to educating and inspiring children for peace) and do volunteer work at Colégio Santa Cruz, offering educational and recreational activities for children of Morro do Jaguaré.
These experiences had a big impact on her life and made her want to learn more about people and what moves them, so she decided to become a journalist. However, in my last year of high-school, her house was broken into while her sisters and she were inside, what was very traumatic and she developed panic syndrome and lost control of most of her life.
Despite of the circumstances, she was accepted at Universidade Mackenzie, where she studied Communication with a major in Journalism, but she quickly realized she wasn’t ready to cover the extreme situations that she was once interested in and decided to pursue an old dream: to live abroad.
She studied International Business in Martin College, Australia, and it was a great experience, as she could get herself back together, and learn new areas of interest, such as Sustainability and Marketing. Back to Brazil, she was an intern at Iniciativa Verde, a NGO that offsets Carbon emissions through plantation of trees and had another international experience at Brazil Boutique, a jewelry distributor based in the US. This gave her a new understanding of the fashion industry and its impacts and she decided to develop her career on it. She worked at Vicunha Têxtil and Swarovski Professional for six years, learned a lot and got to be responsible for Swarovski Professional Marketing in Latam.
Being part of a big corporation and dealing with many others, she realized a lack of women in middle and top management, which led her to study gender-related topics. That’s when she learned that 80% of the violence against women come from their partners/ex. She couldn’t believe that women were in greater risk inside their own houses than out in the streets. Having her life dramatically changed because of that one day of violence she experienced, she couldn’t help and wonder what would it be like for those who experience daily violence from those who are meant to care for them the most. She had to do something and that’s when Utopiar came to her life.
Renata Rizzi
Nationality: Brazil
Organization Name: Utopiar
Impact Region: South America
About the Social Business: Utopiar is a sustainable fashion brand, which helps women to overcome domestic abuse in Brazil.
About the Y&Y Fellow: Renata was born in São Paulo, in a very multicultural family. She has always loved to hear people’s stories and learn from them, which led her to join CISV (a global organization dedicated to educating and inspiring children for peace) and do volunteer work at Colégio Santa Cruz, offering educational and recreational activities for children of Morro do Jaguaré.
These experiences had a big impact on her life and made her want to learn more about people and what moves them, so she decided to become a journalist. However, in my last year of high-school, her house was broken into while her sisters and she were inside, what was very traumatic and she developed panic syndrome and lost control of most of her life.
Despite of the circumstances, she was accepted at Universidade Mackenzie, where she studied Communication with a major in Journalism, but she quickly realized she wasn’t ready to cover the extreme situations that she was once interested in and decided to pursue an old dream: to live abroad.
She studied International Business in Martin College, Australia, and it was a great experience, as she could get herself back together, and learn new areas of interest, such as Sustainability and Marketing. Back to Brazil, she was an intern at Iniciativa Verde, a NGO that offsets Carbon emissions through plantation of trees and had another international experience at Brazil Boutique, a jewelry distributor based in the US. This gave her a new understanding of the fashion industry and its impacts and she decided to develop her career on it. She worked at Vicunha Têxtil and Swarovski Professional for six years, learned a lot and got to be responsible for Swarovski Professional Marketing in Latam.
Being part of a big corporation and dealing with many others, she realized a lack of women in middle and top management, which led her to study gender-related topics. That’s when she learned that 80% of the violence against women come from their partners/ex. She couldn’t believe that women were in greater risk inside their own houses than out in the streets. Having her life dramatically changed because of that one day of violence she experienced, she couldn’t help and wonder what would it be like for those who experience daily violence from those who are meant to care for them the most. She had to do something and that’s when Utopiar came to her life.