Fátima Mello is a program officer in the Ford Foundation’s 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 policy making. 

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 collective initiatives including the People’s Summit timed to the UN Rio+20 conference. Before that, she spent nine years as a researcher focused on inequalities at the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE). 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 and a PhD on Brazilian foreign policy at Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro, where she also taught international cooperation.