Description

Mariko,
I am pleased to recommend the special grants below. As you know, we invited our democracy grantees to nominate partners for consideration of support. We asked grantees to identify organizations that they collaborate with to advance shared goals or rely upon to carry out their own work. We believed that this approach to grantmaking in an exploratory initiative would be educational for us, helping us to understand better the networks and alliances that shape and define the democracy field. We also wanted to experiment with participatory approaches to grantmaking.
We received more than two dozen nominations. You and I reviewed the endorsements prepared by the democracy grantees and agreed to invite full proposals from six organizations. I have reviewed those proposals and supporting materials and am recommending general operating grants of $100,000 for each of the following:
Casa da Povo (CdP) ,  São Paulo , Brazil. The DESIS Lab at Parsons nominated Casa da Povo for support. DESIS is working with Brazilian partners to develop a new approach to cooperative social housing in Brazil. FICA is the principal partner in the project and is headquartered at CdP, a community center in the Bom Retiro neighborhood of  São Paulo that is the focus of FICA’s work. CdP was founded by anti-fascist Jewish Brazilians in 1946; as the Bom Retiro neighborhood has changed, CdP has changed with it. Now, the center serves the poor and immigrant communities of the neighborhood, housing community organizations, like a boxing club for favela youth, a printmakers collective, and a textile workers cooperative. CdP used the pandemic to deepen its relationships with the neighborhood and to allow the community to guide programming. Like DESIS and FICA, CdP seeks to reinvigorate democracy by building social capital.