Over the past year, Joseph Beasley, director of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in Atlanta, a non-governmental civil rights organization founded by Rev. Jesse Jackson in the early '70s, has flown three times to Sao Paolo, Brazil thanks to the valuable contacts he made through GCIV as a professional counterpart.

The reason for Rev. Beasley's visits to Sao Paolo was to secure resources and promote a newly chartered university dedicated to expanding access to higher education for Afro-descendants and other racial minority groups in Brazil.

Rev. Beasley became first involved in this ambitious project in October 2002 when he hosted a reception for five delegates of the

Society for Afro-Brazilian Socio-Cultural Development (AFROBRAS), a nonprofit organization created in 1997 to foster educational opportunities for Brazilians Afro-descendants, who were in Atlanta under the U.S. Department of State's International Visitor Leadership Program. Soon, he was happy to inform his AFROBRAS counterparts of a BellSouth donation to the library of the new university, that the Coca-Cola Foundation had pledged substantial support, and that plans were underway for a partnership with the University of Florida.

"The role of the International Visitor Leadership Program is huge," Rev. Beasley acknowledges. "By connecting different people, it is not only filling the gap of cultures and races, but also it is advancing meaningful causes." The planned Palmares University, named after "Zumbi dos Palmares," the hero of the anti-slavery resistance in Brazil, was open last November and offers courses in business administration and in education.

Meanwhile, Rev. Beasley is already planning new opportunities in his crusade towards social justice. Perhaps, this will be as a result of new contacts he has recently made with other GCIV sponsored visitors from Hungary, Ecuador or some French-speaking African countries.