The Salesian Graphics Trades Centre, is a social work of the Salesians of Porte Alegre Province, run by the Pequeno Operário e Gráfica Dom Bosco community. Aimed at young people of working class families, it offers a training course in graphic arts. The students are required to be from 15 to 18 years of age and in the 8th year of basic education and/or aiming for Middle School.

The course offered by the CPG is of one year’s duration (800 hours/class time). Given its environment and grpahics setup, it is able to take in, assist and prepare 60 young students, spread across five educational segments: 30 attend of a morning and 30 of an afternoon. Students do theory, practice and human and Christian formation. The course is completely free.

The programme is divided into 5 units, in which technical assistance is offered enabling the young student to gradually acquire more active knowledge:

Unit 1: Art and imagination. This is where ideas are created. This offers the young student knowledge of the techniques of graphic design, painting, layout, notebooks, blocks and packaging;
Unit 2: electronic publishing. This unit prepres them for finalising published material. They learn to work with applications for graphic publishing, diagrammes, putting together pamphlets, books, magazines, folders, business cards….
Unit 3: Assembly: the aim of this unit is to train the student in precision, care and ability pertaining to this stage of graphic production - mounting, copying, preparing plates;
Unit 4: Offset printing. This unit aims to prepare them in the operation and management of machines.
Unit 5: Finishing and binding: The aim here is to improve the manual capacity of the student to prepare materials with quality and efficiency

Founded in 1996, the CPG aims to “form honest citizens and good Christians”. Don Bosco’s charism was always active along these lines.