Catalytic Communities’ mission is to promote the well-being of Rio de Janeiro’s favela residents through strategic and deeply interconnected support of committed grassroots socio-environmental community organizers, collectively co-creating initiatives that drive community-controlled social change centered on people and their natural environment.
How We Work
We are progressively working to dismantle structural racism and achieve climate justice: a future that fully respects the history, potential and intrinsic value of these homegrown settlements. We have developed a responsive framework, built on trusting relationships with thousands of favela organizers, that integrates: facilitation, networking and peer exchange, strategic communication and narrative transformation, education and capacity-building, citizen-led research and data generation, agile use of technology and mapping, and grassroots urban planning.
Our Vision
Rio de Janeiro has some of the most established informal urban settlements in the world. As such, the accumulated knowledge, history, achievements and accomplishments—and existing challenges—of these communities allow us to learn, generate creative solutions and overcome obstacles, and can (and should) inspire fairer and more successful processes for working with such settlements worldwide. The UN predicts that informal urban settlements will be the center of global population growth in the coming decades: they will be home to a third of the world’s population by 2050.
All of our activities are network-based, making strategic use of social media, offering community training, engaging in advocacy for rights, and developing actions through co-created methodologies (true participatory planning), with the goal of one day realizing Rio de Janeiro’s potential as an example of restorative urban integration.
Strategic Programs
Currently we manage three programs that, together, generate a virtuous cycle of restorative integration. Through RioOnWatch, our bilingual favela reporting platform, we confront the stigmatizing, prejudiced and counterproductive narrative of favelas with news written and defined by those who live in and know both the strengths and challenges imposed by chronic State neglect. Through the Sustainable Favela Network, we have built a powerful movement engaging hundreds of socio-environmental organizers from favelas across Rio de Janeiro, generating exchanges, training, implementation of nature-based solution technologies, community-led research, communication and advocacy, with the common goal of achieving climate justice in our city and across the world. And through the Favela Community Land Trust program, we introduced CLTs—a transformational tool—in Brazil to generate genuine land security that respects the collective assets built by favelas, and that advocate to guarantee adequate infrastructure for all.
Art by: Rodrigo Binarts