Roberto Menescal

CEO at Fundação Brasil Criativo

My experience and deep interests:

• Campaigning & Advocacy

• Community & Ecosystem Building

• Entrepreneurship

• Governance

• Law

I am based in: Brasília

Growing up in a family of 10 kids and being the youngest allowed me to co-experience many adventures and learnings from my brothers and sisters. From early childhood I watched each of my siblings travel abroad as exchange or Graduate Students. And that is why going on an adventure abroad sounded as the natural path for me to follow.  At age 18, on my second year of Business School, I left the comfort of my home in Brazil and decided to go to the USA to learn a new language and experience the cultural diversity I longed since childhood.

My years living away from my country and family taught me important lessons such as to embrace change and its inevitability, to be accepting of the wide variety of cultures and religions and especially, to remain open to the many learning opportunities as they come by often disguised by failure, success, and fear.  This early adulthood experience set the milestones which guided me through a few career changes and led me to a multidisciplinary set of skills to face many different personal and professional challenges. During the last 20 years I have been fortunate to work as a lawyer, litigating as well as consulting, I also have helped businesses to develop strategic plans and form high-performance teams, I have developed the Timing and Scoring project for the Rio Pan American Games in 2007, uniting for the first time my passion for sports and my professional skills,  I have implemented the largest International Real Estate Franchise in Brazil, facing challenges during the sector´s crisis of 2008. The combined set of skills allowed me to implement and promote cultural change in a Sports Organization during 2010 until 2017, when I had the opportunity to also combine my paying activities with my volunteer work in sports.

In 2015 I was invited to take on the challenged as CEO of the Brazil Creative Foundation, an organization where I had worked as a volunteer for over 15 years and have a good understanding of its endeavors. My mission now is to restructure the organization in order to develop a wider range of services and events as well as different options for raising funds and generating a sustainable capital stream that would allow us to spread even further the Creative Thinking in Brazil.