I am Rita Lança.

I was born in the hot month of August 1980 and I am a being deeply marked by the landscapes with which I have merged. The mother landscape - the Alentejo plain - lent me the horizon, inner serenity, love of contemplation and poetry, openness to the world and imagination. In the heart of this community I learned to love the earth and all the beings that inhabit it, to care in close proximity, to live in horizontality from a sacred awareness of verticality.

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I am curious by nature, thirsty to learn, to explore life and the mystery that surrounds it and, over the years, I have been opening up and surrendering to the changes and transitions that life has challenged me with.

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I realised from an early age that helping people was something natural and fluid for me, a very familiar landscape. I graduated in Social Work and, for almost two decades, I worked in a variety of contexts - Coimbra, Lisbon, Porto, Serra do Montemuro, Alentejo, Barlavento Algarvio, Africa, South America - and situations - with children and young people, families, communities, immigrant groups, men who had fought in the war, homeless people and social tourism, among others. I have performed different roles, from social worker, technical director, executive director, designer and implementer of projects, national and European funded, one of which won the BPI Solidário Award 2016. I have been a volunteer in several organisations throughout my life, in national contexts and internationally, having carried out missions in Argentina and Angola.

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The variety of contexts, roles and experiences provided me with a flexible way of looking at things and a more holistic approach to social needs. By choice, I have always worked in the Third Sector – in private organisations of social solidarity – because for me it was always vital to have space to create, to intervene in reality from the perspective of continuous action research.

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At the same time, I have dedicated myself to research in the area of ​​social innovation and volunteering. I collaborated with the University of Coimbra and the Center for Social Studies and I was part of the first Portuguese Social Incubator.

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I have been working with various models of intervention such as Morenian Psychodrama, Rogerian Counselling, Deep Ecology and various tools related to the arts.

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In 2018, I undertook one of the biggest transitions I have allowed myself to live. I noticed that the configurations and settings in which I intervened socially, up til then, no longer responded to the being I had become. For many who were close to me, it was the abandonment of a solid and promising professional path. For me, it was a major step in my life's journey, one that has brought me closer to what I was born to live. Beyond  everything I was already doing, I knew that the next landscape would have to be contemplation of accompanying people with intimacy, responding to spiritual needs and integrating other resources that I have been collecting throughout my life, namely the connection to Nature, to plants, and artistic expression, especially singing. In this process of deepening, I realised that I have grown as a doula and recognised myself as a doula.