This article aims to present reports of the personal and professional life trajectory of graduate and/or postgraduate social workers from the Department of Social Service at PUC-Rio which completes 85 years of its creation and 50 years of implementation of its Graduate Program, in 2022. The testimonies start from a reflection on the relevance of a political pedagogical project, based on the training of social workers from the popular classes – mostly women, black, activist of social movements, residents of the periphery and coming from community college entrance exams – and who enter a highly prestigious private community university, through an affirmative action policy. Such policies have been producing substantial changes in society, by breaking with perverse cycle of successive exclusions of certain social groups that have been denied their civil rights.