Júlia Mota Silva

Júlia Mota (she/her) is a 25-year-old black Brazilian woman. She holds a degree in Public Policy Management from the University of São Paulo and works as Advocacy Specialist at Fundo Agbara, the first fund focused on the economic justice of Black women in Brazil.

Since the age of 16, she has been dedicated to the struggle for human rights, beginning her activism in popular movements resisting the coup against the president. At university, she worked as a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Observatory of Public Policies Professor Doctor José Renato de Campos Araújo and was part of the student union of the course.

At the age of 21, she became closer to civil society by working at a social impact consultancy, ponteAponte, and as a counselor at the Rede Potências Periféricas.

In 2023, she assumed the position of Executive Assistant at Fundo Agbara, during which she took on various responsibilities, ranging from structuring institutional development processes to fundraising. In the same year, she co-organized the Fund’s first international event, in partnership with the Brazilian Consulate and the Brazil–United States Chamber of Commerce.

In the following year, she began to dedicate herself to structuring the Advocacy area of Agbara, focused on national and international advocacy in economic justice, reparation of the Black population, and the well-being of Black women. In this role, she began representing the Fund in networks such as the Rede Orçamento Mulher and in multilateral spaces, including the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.

Also in 2024, she structured and began to lead the first international project conceived by the organization: Black Women Shaping Afrofutures, a forum that brings together Black women from the Global South and the African diaspora to debate economic justice, historical reparation, and possible futures. The first edition took place in New York, in parallel with the UN Summit of the Future, in partnership with Brazilian and international organizations.

She is also part of and contributes to the Rede Brasileira de Defensoras de Direitos Humanos and, in 2025, was elected representative of the Free Conference of Women Human Rights Defenders for the National Women’s Conference.

Júlia is a participant in the 2025-2026 Human Rights Advocates Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University.