Espaço Progredir was born from the discomfort of a group of people who were working in another organization assisting adolescents, who, due to drug addictions and involvement with drug trafficking, were unable to adapt and ended up abandoning all the protective actions offered. So, as much as they wanted to stay and change the course of their lives, they ended up returning to the streets and to a situation of personal risk, which often led to their death.

The dream began with the search for more specific work aimed at treating adolescents with this profile of drug abuse, using a variety of methods and tools and thus adapting to the individuality and particularities of each person. Based on this search, the team began to specialize and draw up a social project which, when presented to many friends in Italy, began to come to life and the first partners and funders emerged. And so, on February 20 2003, a meeting was held with 23 people who decided to carry out a day of social work for drug-involved adolescents and their families. And so Espaço Progredir was born, a non-profit organization, located in Miguel Couto, a neighborhood divided between the municipalities of Nova Iguaçu and Belford Roxo, in the Baixada Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro.

Later, in 2005, we opened our own headquarters and, as the physical structure was favorable, we also began systematic prevention work based on a diagnosis in the local community, which ended up showing the many problems that families had as a result of drug abuse, especially alcohol. Due to the ease of access to drugs from an early age, many children ended up using illicit drugs, motivating even more this need to add a Prevention Program to the project.

With the growth of the prevention and treatment programs, the need arose for another physical space to separate the programs, and so in 2011, we acquired a building in the center of Nova Iguaçu for the treatment program.

In 2015, due to the economic crisis in which Brazil found itself, and consequently Espaço Progredir as well, it was decided to reunite the two programs at the Miguel Couto headquarters, thus integrating the two work teams and making it possible to enhance the two programs and optimize the work.

The initial team remains the same as the one that founded the institution, but new people have joined as the organization has grown and the work has expanded. These new people are not just professionals who have been hired, but also many volunteers: Brazilians from the community and elsewhere, as well as foreigners and interns from various universities who are looking to learn and gain experience in our field of work.