Fátima Mello is a program officer in the Ford Foundation office in Brazil. She has been working for more than 30 years in the domestic and international community of civil society active in social, gender, racial and environmental justice, human rights and democratic governance. She focuses on gathering diverse players and building cross-sectoral agendas with an aim to fight inequalities and achieve a broader impact in policymaking.

Prior to joining Ford, she worked for 22 years at the Brazilian organization, FASE—Solidarity and Education, as program coordinator and national executive director. During this period, she was in charge of coordinating several collective initiatives, such as the People’s Summit timed to the UN Rio+20 conference. Before then, she spent nine years as a researcher focused on inequalities at IBrazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis. She also worked as a researcher on human rights defenders at Amnesty International in Brazil.

Fátima is a historian with a master’s degree in international relations at Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro where she was a teacher on international cooperation. She is also a PhD candidate there, writing her thesis on Brazilian foreign policy.