Ronaldo Matos
Executive Director, Desenrola E Não Me Enrola
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“In a world without social and economic inequality, all people can create individual and collective plans for the futures of their neighborhoods, cities, states, and countries.”
Ronaldo Matos is a journalist, educator, and researcher with a passion for using communication to further racial and economic equality. As the cofounder of Desenrola E Não Me Enrola, a nonprofit media organization in Brazil, Ronaldo works to improve media literacy, expand information access, and combat misinformation within historically excluded communities.
With Desenrola E Não Me Enrola, Ronaldo leads three initiatives: Você Repórter da Periferia, a media education program that trains the next generation of young, Black, independent journalists; News Portal Desenrola, an independent media outlet that produces news about social impact solutions created by residents of peripheral areas, favelas, quilombos, and Indigenous lands; and Território da Notícias, a software and hardware program designed to combat information deserts and expand access for underrepresented communities. He is currently conducting research on the health of Brazilian democracy, the consequences of informational inequality, and the effects of the overdependence on digital platforms on independent media ecosystems in Brazil.
Ronaldo believes that by strengthening media literacy and access to information through new open technologies, communicators and journalists working with underrepresented populations can prevent misinformation and restore human, social, and democratic relationships to promote a healthy culture of civic engagement and social justice.