For almost ten months, The Brazilian Report has battled for transparency regarding First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro’s philanthropic grants for non-profit and religious organizations distributed through the National Program to Encourage Volunteering (‘Volunteer Homeland’). The program funnels money directly to charitable institutions. Once available through a dashboard on the program’s website, the data on donors, amounts, and grantees has vanished.
Up until this July, the program had dished out BRL 12.9 million (USD 2.4 million), according to the federal government.
To find the recipients of the money, it is now necessary to dig through data on a low-quality PDF file, the…