This past winter, Brazil’s Casa Socio-Environmental Fund made one of the biggest moves in its twenty-year history. The Brazilian grantmaking institution launched the Sociobiodiversity Web, a grantmaking program to inject R$53 million – or US$9.6 million – into grassroots organizations focused on sociobiodiversity and nature-based solutions to climate change.
The project is bankrolled in part by CAIXA, a large government bank, marking a significant institutional commitment to Casa’s work from a domestic funder. Over the next two years, 400 grants will be distributed through this program, alongside another 600 through the Casa Fund’s other partnerships.
For Maria Amalia Souza, the Casa Fund’s founder, this web of grants is about more than just funding – it’s about proving that global majority-led funds can move significant capital at scale, as climate funders continue to funnel billions into international NGOs.
We spoke with Souza about how the Casa Fund has grown over the decades; the emergence of a new alliance of proximate funds; and what it means to scale without losing sight of local leadership.
Share more about the theory behind your latest grantmaking vehicle, the Sociobiodiversity Web.
The Amazon is worse off today than it was decades ago. Billions of dollars have gone into the hands of a handful of conservation NGOs based in the Global North with promises to protect it – and yet, the ecosystem continues to degrade.
It has been like this for over 40 years, with promises of saving the Amazon and other natural ecosystems in our region. Yet funders keep doing the same thing, believing outside players can come here to solve our problems.
That’s because funders have been short-sighted. The only way to protect places like the Amazon is to get resources into the hands of the communities that have been protecting them for centuries, even millennia. Indigenous territories remain the most protected forests on the planet, even [without philanthropy].
They are only getting money now because organizations like Casa Fund exist. We see a bit beginning to change with the development of Indigenous and other territorial funds, which we are very excited about. But while they build their new funds, an architecture of more experienced funds like ours are here to hold the fort and hopefully scale considerably.
You’re often out on the conference circuit, reminding people that the infrastructure exists in the Global South for proximate funding models. What’s stopping the money from flowing?
We’ve proven our model works. We’ve been audited by the same firms that audit Ford Foundation, for example. We’ve produced dozens of evaluations and publications that demonstrate evidence of positive impact. And yet, the money doesn’t arrive [from the Global North] at the level that we need to produce the exponential change we need.
It doesn’t arrive because there seems to be a preconceived idea that we lack capacity—that we can’t be trusted with large amounts of money. That needs to change. Infrastructure exists here. The pathways to getting money to the Global South are already there. In fact, many of us represent the strongest philanthropic infrastructure in our regions.
We often get questioned why we don’t ask our own wealthy people in Brazil for funds. I know it is difficult to understand from the outside, but in Brazil (and most of the previously colonized countries of the Global South) family and corporate foundations prefer to execute their own social projects rather than [supporting the grassroots]. So we still rely greatly on international donors for most of our grantmaking. That’s one reason our partnership with CAIXA is so important – it is the largest grant in our history, and it comes from Brazil.
Still, that doesn’t leave global climate funders off the hook. The level of scale that we need to fund the frontline groups that assure the protection of our region’s crucial climate regulating biomes is in the eight digits numbers or more. We need it and we can handle it.
You are also the founder of Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur, of which Casa Fund is a member. Tell me about that evolution.
When Casa was founded in 2005, we went beyond Brazilian borders to fund across South America. The Amazon spans nine countries, so you can’t save the “Brazilian Amazon.” That doesn’t exist. You need to understand the entire region to place resources where they are missing.
By 2014, we realized the next step was decentralization. Instead of expanding our own reach, we should help other funds to get set up inside their own countries. Together we could fund the whole region better. So we approached partners in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador and asked, Would you set up your own funds if we helped you with everything—systems, contracts, relationships?
They went for it. We introduced them to funders and shared everything we had learned, our infrastructure, systems, due diligence, etc. So now Casa is just a Brazilian fund, and that’s a good thing. We don’t need to be everywhere; we need more funds, each embedded in their own communities, working together to produce the deep and exponential change we need. We shrunk in geography but grew exponentially by joining forces.
Fast forward to 2021. By then, we weren’t just a handful of funds—we were a movement. We saw the power of networks like Prospera, which brought women’s funds together to push gender justice philanthropy. We wanted to do the same for socio-environmental funds. So in November 2021, I made a few phone calls, and within a month, we launched Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur — Socio-Environmental Funds of the Global South.
In an interview about the Alianza last year, you told Inside Philanthropy that you don’t like the term “intermediary.” Why not?
The term “intermediary” suggests we are just a pass-through for money, a mere transaction. But that’s not what we do.
We call ourselves the self-financing arm of our own movements because we add real value, deep knowledge and unparalleled trust relationships. We are not just transferring funds—we are strengthening the very fabric of our own democracies, with global impact.
All of us were created by local actors with deep commitment and understanding of local contexts. We know the people, we know the issues, and we are in the best position to get resources directly to those who need them most.
The best way to describe our work is “social acupuncture”: we recognize the points in the system that need to be stimulated for change to happen. We look at the macro challenges of a region, then act in many micro points, multi approach, simultaneously. So our grants may be smaller by large funders standards, but they are the right size to bring excluded communities out of total invisibility — the very people who are keeping the sky from falling, like our great shaman David Yanomami explains.
They keep life alive! And we meet them where they are and make sure they succeed. Our grants are not isolated. They are combined to provoke a true, deep and lasting systemic change.
