Carolina de Moura Campos

At the young age of 19, CaroLina began her passion for environmental activism as a founder of the NGO ‘4 Cantos do Mundo’, an organization encouraging initiatives like forest protection and restoration, agro-ecology, and promotion of social and environmental rights. By age 23, she was also a founder of the Center for Socio-Environmental Support (CASA), an organization that manages grants for development projects. Her palpable initiative and commitment to this line of work is inspiring. CaroLina’s nominator says of the grantee, “she takes the work on sustainability issues not just as a job, but also as a life commitment”. CaroLina’s spontaneity and strong communication skills give her the ability to inspire those around her, and with further leadership development, she hopes to continue being “enthusiastically dedicated to the efforts for a more fair and sustainable world”.

CaroLina would like to improve her capacity as an actor able to effectively argue in environmental negotiations at local, regional and international levels. Her JWH Initiative grant will help her achieve this goal by funding her participation in an International Executive MBA on Environmental Management and Sustainability at Fundação Getúlio Vargas. The course will shed light on issues of environmental management and laws, licensing and analysis of environmental impacts, and sustainability indicators, particularly in relation to the business sector. Although the course is still in progress, CaroLina has so far learned a few very important lessons, including the significance of understanding capacity and limitations of an organization, the necessity of adequate technical knowledge in a project, and the benefits of connecting local realities with international tendencies in the environmental sector. The MBA program includes an international module at Ohio University in the USA, where CaroLina will also get the opportunity to advance her English language abilities, which she hopes will facilitate her environmental work at an international level. CaroLina has shown her commitment to Civil Society Organizations to be unwavering, and her work with the JWH Initiative will merely advance her along the path to being a global leader in environmental sustainability.