14 de July de 2026
The trajectory of the Education Laboratory, which in 2022 marks 10 years of work, is intrinsically linked to the professional trajectory of one of its founders—and now President—the educator Beatriz Cardoso, who for 15 years led the Educational Community – CEDAC, an organization that developed benchmark teacher training programs in partnership with municipal education departments.
The decision to leave an established institution to found a new one, starting over despite the challenges, is the subject of a class for Fellows at Harvard University, taking place on August 25, with Beatriz participating. The case based on the experience of founding the Education Laboratory will be discussed in the context of the Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) program, whose cohort is in the process of formulating and initially developing their social ventures. The document, prepared over the year in which Beatriz was a Fellow in the same program, was selected for being a practical example of how to approach building partnerships to develop an original and innovative project, mobilizing technical and financial resources even before the initiative was taken off the drawing board.
This is the second time Beatriz has taken part in this initiative. In September 2021, she led the cohort of Fellows for the 2021–2022 cycle to present Labedu. On that occasion, Beatriz spoke about the goal of boosting Brazilian education through the production of tools that translate cutting-edge knowledge on child development, enriching the everyday practices of educators inside and outside the formal education system. Ten years ago, when the Education Laboratory was created, the content, format, and potential of these tools existed only in theory, which created obstacles to initial fundraising. However, the know-how accumulated by the institution’s leadership, combined with the ability to implement agile field research processes to generate pilot materials and strategies—always from a training perspective—enabled some social investors to bet on the concept that has been behind Labedu from the beginning.
This year, in her participation at Harvard, Beatriz will speak about how, although it has established numerous partnerships and enabled the creation of projects and methodologies over the past decade, Labedu still faces a major challenge in overcoming the barriers that exist in the field of funding. “Most funders finance the execution of projects on the ground without valuing institutional aspects beyond implementation. In our view, there is no intelligence on the ground if the institution does not have a prepared and stable technical team that learns from the field, systematizes content and knowledge, carries out monitoring, and has tools for course correction. The much-discussed sustainability means having a technical staff and institutional working conditions that, on the one hand, bring stability, but on the other, ensure consistent progress in the social and educational field, achieving results,” comments Beatriz.
The history of the Education Laboratory includes other interesting aspects, such as the fact that it has an intergenerational vision, which is part of its essence. Beatriz began this new professional trajectory at the peak of her career, at the time as a 50+ woman. The institution was born with women in leadership who span different age groups. And it is in this exchange between generations that Labedu consolidates itself as an organization capable of pushing boundaries. The richness of having a team made up of professionals of different ages—between 20 and 60 years old—mostly women, imprints on the institution’s DNA a collaborative way of conceiving projects, working in a network. Labedu combines an extremely qualified technical perspective with the ability to keep the end audience—children who learn and adults who educate—at the center. The diverse experiences of the multidisciplinary team that makes up the organization add different and complementary perspectives to each project and its implementation.