Conversation with Elas+, Editorial April 2022

Amalia Fischer

The year 2022 has arrived and heralded a period of many challenges. ELAS+ has prepared for them.

We ended the year 2021 with the launch of the research Activism and Pandemic in Brazil in a Live that reaffirmed the importance and power of women's organizations and trans people for social transformations. On March 23, we held an International Live(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToyLxU7GEC4) with the aim of making Brazilian women's organizations better known to international philanthropy.

We plan, for this first semester, no less than the launch of three calls for proposals: Black Women Alliance For the End of Violence, with registrations closed on Sunday, 24/4, with 228 registrations received; Empodera - Fashion Transforming Lives, which has just been launched on April 25; and another call for proposals of the victorious Program. Building Movementswhich will be powerful in its sixth edition. Look forward to it.

ELAS+ is increasingly alive and active in its mission of Giving for change. And a surprise came! And how nice that the unexpected reaffirmed our beliefs and values! We received the news that ELAS+ is on the list of organizations contemplated by Mackenzie Scott's donations. It was gratifying to receive this kind of recognition, and for that there are no words to thank this philanthropist who realized the importance of having full confidence in the strategies and work of the diversity of civil society organizations.

For 21 years we have been supporting groups from a feminist genealogy. During this trajectory, we have learned from other Women's Funds, organizations, activists and feminist thinkers in Brazil and around the world. This learning allows us to do a work of excellence in grantmaking for the Leadership of organizations, collectives, groups of women and LBTI people, because they are the ones who know their needs, realities, contexts and have the solutions to their problems.

Mackenzie Scott, from the attentive listening, the experience and the experiences of other leaders who are applying important values to make their donations, stood out, was different, generous, and inaugurated a new way of donating, giving clues so that other and other philanthropists can also innovate in the traditional philanthropic ecosystem of the world. By investing in trust in all the organizations contemplated, it leaves us free in our strategies, methodologies, knowledge, experience, wisdom, needs and criteria for using resources. In fact, this decision reinforces the way Women's Funds donate, as well as ELAS+: Giving for change.