As we grow closer to the start of 2021, we’re wrapping up the challenging year of 2020 by celebrating the winners of the Jeffrey Sherman Life-Changers Award – a prestigious BD award that recognizes associates who are making a lasting impact on those around them, both through what they do at work and outside of work. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing stories about our five 2020 winners and the incredible impact they’re having on those around them.

Here, we share the inspiring story of Life-Changers Award winner Marcelo Alves Lopes, who works as a Quality Auditor for BD Medical – Medication Delivery Solutions in Juiz de Fora, Brazil.

At BD, Marcelo’s nominators say he is a strong leader, adept when it comes to engaging his BD colleagues and challenging them to drive continuous improvement in BD’s plant in Juiz de Fora, always encouraging colleagues to keep their collective focus on compliance.  Marcelo is also credited for significantly enhancing the sense of team and camaraderie among associates in Juiz de Flores, by creating a BD running team that he’s led since 2012, which gives BD associates the opportunity to discover the benefits that fitness and sports can have on our ability to lead healthy lives.

Outside of BD, Marcelo has played an integral leadership role in serving vulnerable populations in his community, by mobilizing teams of BD volunteers to create inclusive, hands-on, community service and mentoring initiatives to serve local people who have intellectual disabilities.

When Marcelo learned that a local organization, called “Educandário Carlos Chagas,” served adults with intellectual disabilities and was located just down the street from his BD plant, he worked with the organization’s leadership to invite them to join his BD running group. For many participants, this interaction with BD volunteers equates to their only opportunity to encounter new environments and meet new people, while also experiencing the benefits of participating in regular physical activity.

Marcelo also developed a group of external partners that provides safety logistics, snacks, T-shirts, shoes, wheelchairs, and other supports to ensure that all community members from “Educandário” who want to participate in the running group have all the resources they need to do so.

Seeing the many benefits that his friends from “Educandário” received from the integrated running group he created, Marcelo then expanded the program, by mobilizing BD associates who participate in a dance group to spend one day per week leading dance classes at the school. In December of last year, this special needs dance group, led by BD volunteers who were mobilized by Marcelo, reached a truly extraordinary milestone. They performed a choreographed dance, together, in front of thousands of people in Central Theater of Juiz de Fora, during a Dance Festival. Marcelo’s nominators say that it was a deeply emotional experience to see how much joy the experience brought to their friends from “Educandário.”  

Marcelo continually demonstrates, by example, how to meaningfully engage BD associates, community members and community organizations through volunteerism. As one of his nominators put it, Marcelo shows us how service to others can help us become better people, better co-workers and better community members, both inside and outside BD.

In honor of the life-changing impact Marcelo has on his colleagues at BD and the world around him, BD is donating $5,000 to the non-profit organization of his choice: Educandário Carlos Chagas, which provides an array of inclusion and life skills services to individuals with intellectual disabilities.  

Stay tuned for more inspiring 2020 Life-Changer Award winner stories, like Marcelo’s, on the BD newsroom.