For millions of Brazilian families, the house they have lived in for decades is legally not theirs. Without title, a home cannot be inherited, cannot secure credit, and cannot be defended in a dispute.
Roots of Freedom exists to close that gap. The organization grew out of Brasil Empreende, an initiative inside SFL Brazil, and became an independent association in 2023. It coordinates everything land regularization requires: municipalities, law firms, engineers, surveyors, registries, and private partners, aligned case by case. That work has helped deliver more than 7,000 property titles in Minas Gerais, each one converting informal possession into a legally recognized asset.
Marina spent four years advising entrepreneurs on trademarks, patents, and intellectual property, learning how formal rights protect people’s work and widen their options, then helped transform a student program into the registered organization she now runs. Inside SFL, she also built the operational pipeline used by ImpactLab to receive, review, and track projects across its portfolio.
Over the next twelve months, she is scaling the model: a new formal municipal partnership, hundreds of additional titles delivered through a regularization project begun during the Fellowship year, and a free public manual that open-sources the entire method, stages, documents, partner roles, costs, and risks, so that other organizations can run it without her.
