The workshop “SASA – Cultivating Connections and Confluences”, held on December 18, 2024, at the Wish Hotel in Salvador, was the highlight of this journey. A full day dedicated to deep dialogue, generous exchange, and mutual recognition. We brought together an impressive plurality of people and organizations, ensuring that diversity of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation resonated as the keynote of the voices engaged in this collective construction.
The discussions that emerged there—and that continue to reverberate in the reports we produced—pointed to concrete paths: toward ethical funding, truly horizontal partnerships, and models of collaboration that respect the timing of communities and the complexity of cultural, social, and political processes. We learned there that resources alone are not enough if they are not accompanied by listening, trust, and a genuine commitment to real transformation.
By the end of this cycle, it had become clear that engaging with funders is not only about seeking support, but about proposing an inversion of logic: that we are not recipients, but co-authors of projects; not beneficiaries, but partners. That development funds become instruments of justice rather than reproductions of colonial inequalities. That resources truly reach where they are needed, and that collective work is recognized as politics, care, and social technology.
We concluded this cycle with the certainty that SASA is a seed—sown by many hands, watered with listening and tenderness. A seed that will germinate across multiple territories, for it carries within itself the collective desire to transform not only the ways of doing, but the ways of relating.
SASA does not end here. It spreads through the bonds created, in the questions that remain, in the networks that keep resonating. May this current continue to flow, opening new paths, overflowing boundaries. May the encounters remain a guiding light. And may we, in the silence between one tide and another, keep asking ourselves: what worlds can we still create together?
We move forward—in confluence, in communion, in living courage.
