This article was originally published in Alliance Magazine on November 5, 2025

By Carola Matarazzo, CEO of Movimento Bem Maior

At the 2025 Brazilian Philanthropy Forum, the theme wasn’t centered on metrics, innovation, or scale, though all of these remain relevant. It was built around a term: hope in action. Not a noun, but a verb. Not a feeling, but a movement. In the spirit of past themes like collaboration and boldness, this year took a step further into action, choosing a verb with deep Brazilian roots and layered meaning.

In Portuguese, esperança means “hope,” but esperançar, a term revitalized by educator, writer and theologian Rubem Alves and widely embraced in the education and social fields, means to hope by doing: to choose, to act, to move toward something better. It’s hope with intention. Hope in motion.

In many ways, esperançar was an invitation to shift our posture. To act differently. Because to truly leave your comfort zone, you don’t need to cross physical borders, you need to cross internal ones: of control, detachment and certainty. And that shift begins, always, by listening.

Carola Matarazzo during the Brazilian Philanthropy Forum 2025. Photo: Andre Porto

In English, “hope” is already a verb. But in Portuguese, this transformation from noun to action carries symbolic weight. It signals a move from intention to commitment. It reminds us that, especially in a country like Brazil, where complexity is structural and inequality historical, to hope is to act. And, as Indigenous leader Daniel Munduruku reminded us during the event: ancestrality is not the past, it is the present.

For those of us working in philanthropy, this shift is urgent. Because comfort in philanthropy doesn’t stem only from where we sit, but from how we act.

Many of us operate with good intentions but outdated logics. We hold onto centralized decisions, standardized metrics, universal solutions. And while we speak of transformation, we often cling to control. Strategy without listening becomes imposition. Measurement without learning becomes vanity. And donating, without acknowledging and believing it is a social movement, becomes maintenance of the status quo.

What I witnessed at the Forum, in conversations, silences, moments of shared discomfort, was a growing collective awareness: to truly leave our comfort zone, we must start by listening. And not globally. Locally.

Listening locally means recognizing the power of those already doing the work, often far from the spotlight. It means honoring the legitimacy of local philanthropists, leaders who live the realities we try to “impact.” These are the people practicing what some call acupuncture philanthropy: identifying key pressure points in their communities and activating change with precision, trust, and deep relational intelligence.

The Brazilian philanthropic field is slowly, but steadily, embracing this logic. Moving from speaking for to building with. From delivering programmes to redistributing power. From occupying space to cultivating partnership. The territory, once seen merely as a beneficiary, is finally being acknowledged as a source of strategy, innovation, and leadership.

At Movimento Bem Maior, this reflection is at the heart of our movement. We believe that systemic change is driven by building collaborative infrastructures that sustain complexity. This means mobilizing not only financial resources, but also reputational and political capital, forming networks of support that move with clear intention. It means drawing from the collective intelligence embedded in local communities, listening deeply to those who face the challenges and are already designing solutions. And it requires intentional alliances that bridge sectors, perspectives, and institutions. These alliances must not be merely symbolic, but structurally committed to lasting transformation.

To “cross borders” does not necessarily mean going far; it means going deeper. To move toward complexity, contradiction, and co-creation. To truly leave your comfort zone, you need to shift your posture. It is in that shift that we begin to see that many of the answers we seek are already here, in the territories, in the relationships, in the people who have long been sustaining life at the margins.

Esperançar reminds us that hope is not a concept. It is a verb. And listening is one of its most powerful forms.