Amalia Fischer

Amalia E. Fischer founded the first women's fund in Brazil to promote gender equality. Through the fund, Amalia is raising awareness surrounding women's contributions and women's issues, while changing patterns of traditional philanthropic giving.

Amalia created a diversity-focused mechanism for social investment in Brazil–one that puts gender equality and women's empowerment at the center of a new philanthropy. She founded the Angela Borba Fund to specifically invest in independent projects by and for women. The fund adopts a pioneering approach to social investment, being one of few organizations in the country that, unlike company foundations and funding institutions that create and administer their own social programs, raise funds in order to redirect them to existing, independent programs.
Amalia is working to modernize the culture of philanthropy and social investment practices in Brazil by launching a campaign involving companies, institutes, and individual donors. Her goal is to transform people's "hand-out" mentality on giving into a deeper understanding about the importance of investing socially in diversity and transforming gender relations. Her message claims that well-placed investment in the socioeconomic, cultural, and technological empowerment of women generates high returns in terms of these women's investment in children, adolescents, and society as a whole.

Despite many advances in the recognition of women's rights in Brazil, women continue to face discrimination, inequality, violence, and lack of opportunities because of their gender. This reality has a direct effect on the economic and social development of the country when considering the important role women have and continue to play in both the home and the workplace. Nearly 25 percent of the women who are economically active are heads of household–equaling 11.2 million women who are the sole providers for their families. Though the gap between salaries for men and women has diminished somewhat, women continue to make 30 percent less than their male counterparts in the same occupation. Violence against women is a hidden and normalized practice; projections from the Abramo Foundation cite 6.8 million Brazilian women as regularly beaten. The situation facing women of color is more grave; lack of access to educational and professional opportunities represents precarious living conditions for these women and their families. Among economically active black women, the vast majority engage in manual labor with 51 percent working as domestic workers. The average salary for white women is nearly three times the average for black women, who make less than US$80 per month.
Over the past 15 years, women in Brazil have formed organizations to address issues like employment, violence, professional training, and health in addition to gender equality and the human rights of women. These organizations have carried out their work largely through support from international funding agencies and organizations. However, many women's organizations are going through an economic crisis given the reduction of international support to Brazil, the lack of know-how in fundraising and resource mobilization, and the lack of interest from national companies and foundations in investing in issues relating to gender and women's rights. Currently, women's organizations report that only 10 percent of program funding comes from Brazilian companies. In a 2000 study on "Social Action of Companies" conducted by IPEA in the business-concentrated southeast region of Brazil, gender relations was not included in the agenda of priorities for the private sector. Only 7 percent of companies support social action promoted by women.
Several factors contribute to the lack of investment in women's organizations and programs that address gender equality. Brazilian society has yet to recognize the importance of investing in women as both a form of promoting equality and a strategy for social transformation and socioeconomic development. As consumers, women influence the purchase of food and household cleaning and hygiene products by nearly 100 percent. They hold over 40 percent of the titles to checking and savings accounts in the two federal Brazilian banks, Banco do Brasil and Caixa Economico. Despite this active consumer role, corporate philanthropy practices fail to consider the importance of women in the economy. In addition to a lack of understanding of women's role in the economy, there is also a lack of visibility and dissemination of successful programs and social change projects that are designed and carried out for and by women. Furthermore, many misconceptions persist about women's groups. Companies and funding institutions tend to perceive women's organizations as exclusive, anti-male, and radical, inhibiting their desire to invest. Ironically, within this national picture, a 2000 study "Donations and Voluntary Work" (Landim and Scalon) shows that 60.1 percent of all types of donations by institutions in Brazil are performed by women.

When Amalia moved to Brazil in 1997, she set out to change patterns of social investment in the country in order to prioritize gender relations and diversity. Amalia's first step was to create a fund that would direct resources toward women's organizations and initiatives. At the same time, the fund and its corresponding education campaign would raise the understanding and visibility of the important role of women in country's socioeconomic development. Amalia started by voicing her idea for creating such a fund and elicited the support and contribution of colleagues and women's rights leaders. Initially begun as a program within the CEMINA women's rights organization in Rio, Amalia founded the Angela Borba Fund in 2001 with the initial financial support from the Ford Foundation and the Global Fund for Women.
After gaining this support and credibility, Amalia registered the fund independently and structured the institution based on the same values of diversity and promotion of women's initiatives. She created a board to review proposals, with nine advisors diverse in their ethnicities, race, sexual orientation, and age. She established the parameters of the fund to support projects that promote women's employment and economic independence, increase access to formal and nonformal education, combat violence against women, improve women's health, address access to technology and communication, support women's art and culture, and defend diversity and difference on ethnic, racial, sexual, and generational levels. The priorities for funding include a three-pronged approach to support groups that do not have the possibility to mobilize resources through other means, whose programs and projects promote the human rights of women, and those organizations specifically dedicated to lesbian, black, or indigenous women's groups.
Amalia developed a shrewd selection process that mirrors the values of the fund: ethics, diversity, and equality. Candidates must submit their projects using a pseudonym with all the information about the organization and references contained in a sealed envelope. Amalia created this method both to avoid favoritism based on personal connections and to ensure that funding is made on merit according to express criteria. This allows greater access for organizations that are not "connected" in a culture of getting what one wants by whom one knows. Amalia's careful measures have made the selection process as objective as possible.
In November 2001, Amalia and her team opened the first call for proposals. In one month, the fund received 110 projects from four of Brazil's five regions. In February 2002, the board met to select 14 projects to receive support from the Angela Borba Fund. Each of the organizations benefits (on average) 800 women–a total of 11,200 women directly affected. In addition to stimulating a change in how companies and individuals conduct their philanthropic practices, Amalia's strategy for creating a sustainable source of funding for the Angela Borba Fund involves mobilization of various sectors of society. First, she is addressing the need to document results and map women's organizations in Brazil in order to prove their importance in social transformation. To do so, she has engaged three university volunteers (with a staff coordinator) who are currently engaged in a broad study of gender and social development in Brazil. She is using the findings of this study to conduct workshops and breakfast meetings with companies to discuss the importance of gender relations and equality. She is also creating both the "Friends of the Angela Borba Fund"–an association to serve as a bank of donors and supporters–and an honorary board with famous and highly respected female leaders from the business, government, and social sectors to lend their names in support of the initiative. Amalia believes that through this aggressive education campaign, she can change the investment culture in Brazil and create a national funding source. In five years, she plans on supporting the fund almost exclusively on "locally-funded" measures. Amalia also recognizes the need for legislative change in Brazil in order to create incentives for social investing. She is lobbying for the reform of fiscal laws that would create tax deductions for donors and for the ability of the fund to maintain an endowment. In 10 years, Amalia plans to create an endowment for the fund to ensure its long-term sustainability.

Amalia was born in Managua and spent much of her childhood between her maternal grandmother's farm in rural Nicaragua and her paternal grandmother's home in Mexico. Her mother's mother was the first female teacher in Nicaragua and taught Amalia to read and love the land. Amalia learned to garden and picked cotton in the summer. Her father's mother inspired her to learn and made her a lover of stories, indigenous culture, poetry, and the fight for social justice.
Amalia's parents supported and encouraged their children's education, even helping Amalia's brother study abroad. But when Amalia went to her father to propose that she do the same, he did not see the importance since her prospects for a career were not significant. She did not relent and enlisted her mother's support and finally convinced him to help her raise the money to spend a year studying in Belgium. There, she was exposed to a world of culture, art, and information and quickly became involved with women's organizations composed of Latin America feminist leaders. She was in Paris when the war in her home country began. Some of her friends and colleagues from the Christian groups she had participated in tried to convince her to return to fight for the Sandanista government. But although she sympathized with many of the ideals of the movement, Amalia's own ideals were fixed on nonviolence. Inspired by Martin Luther King and as a proponent of democracy, equality, and inclusion, she would not participate in violent actions for the Sandinista cause. Upon leaving Europe, she decided not to live in her war-torn country and returned instead to her grandmother's home in Mexico.
In Mexico, Amalia continued to study and became a professor of political sociology at the Autonomous University of Mexico at the age of 21. At the university, she kept her focus on gender equality and cofounded the Center for Women's Studies and the Center for Research and Capacity-building for Women. When Amalia increased her activity in the feminist movement she realized that without resources, it was difficult to transform the conditions of inequality that women experience. She was inspired by two examples in Mexico: Semillas, a fund for resources for women and the Mexican Center for Philanthropy. Her other inspiration came from two northern women's funds: Mama Cash in Holland, which funded many of her research on feminism in Latin America, and the Global Fund for Women in the U.S.
In 1996 Mama Cash invited Amalia to be their representative in Brazil. Concerned about taking on this role as a foreigner, she consulted with Brazilian colleagues in the feminist movement and told them of her idea to create a fund for women in Brazil. The enthusiastic response and offer for support convinced her that the moment was right and she began to design–and negotiate the creation of–the Angela Borba Fund, a name chosen in honor of a leader in the fight for women's rights and re-democratization in Brazil.