“How can you think about creating civic spaces when those who fight for them are being threatened?” Funding, safety, democracy promotion, and community control in the Global South cannot be understood in isolation from one another, and this is where direct community funding comes in.

Mara Carneiro, formerly the general coordinator (executive director) of CEDECA Ceará (Centro de Defesa da Criança e do Adolescente do Ceará, The Center for the Defense of Children and Adolescents of Ceará), raised this question to NPQ when asked to discuss the role of direct community funding in supporting human rights defense work in Brazil.

The questions of funding, safety, democracy promotion, and community control in the Global South cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Who writes the checks, in short, is not the only factor to consider. But having direct community control of philanthropy is important.

Indeed, in Brazil, direct community funding has proven to be essential in enabling community activists to organize and respond to state violence—and to defend human rights.

The Curió Massacre

In November 2015, in an act of retaliation for the death of a police officer, military police officers executed 11 people in about three hours in a peripheral area of the city of Fortaleza in an event known as the Curió Massacre. Most of the victims were under 18 years old.

Public outrage over the massacre has led to one of the most extensive set of trials on police violence in the history of Brazil. The mere existence of these cases already represents a milestone for human rights in Brazil. It is also a powerful example of the role of local organizations in social transformation and the potential for flexible, long-term philanthropic funding to drive change.

Human rights work in Brazil is urgent….Incarceration rates have risen rapidly [to] the third-highest prison population in the world.

These cases come not a moment too soon in a country where over 6,000 people have died annually at the hands of police officers—in 2024, that number was 6,243, according to the Brazilian Yearbook of Public Security (Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública). This is where direct community funding for nonprofits like CEDECA Ceará enters the picture.

Read the full article about direct community funding by Ana Valéria Araújo at Nonprofit Quarterly.