"That is a bag of trash." Farida looks at Carla Maria and shakes her head. The two women are sitting outside Farida's house in the humid Indian jungle. Carla Maria has been making necklaces out of wood and is showing Farida her material. Telling me this, she is laughing. "I flew to India wanting to help and she was just shaking her head at my ideas. That was when I asked her if I could live with her for a month. I wanted to fully understand before offering any solutions."

Carla Maria de Souza · Project Tres · Linkedin · @projecttres

Carla Maria de Souza is one of the people I'm building this club around. Her story holds all the complexity 2026 has to offer: belonging, migration, responsibility, gender, scale-refusal, domestic violence. Our phone call starts with her mantra. "I don't really believe I HAVE TO do anything."

She explains: "Growing up with a Christian background I felt a great deal of responsibility. I can't work with that kind of pressure. Nobody can. This is what led me to believe that we should let go of everything that starts with 'we have to'."

“Wherever you go, there you are – do you know this quote? I was carrying something inside me that would follow me wherever I went. I knew this. The very first feeling I remember feeling is fear. But I wasn’t looking into myself.” Carla Maria is very honest about being raised in domestic violence and financial scarcity. “I wanted to help, but I was looking for something deeper. I wanted to heal alongside others.”

Before that search had words, she tried the obvious answer first. She used to believe that if she had money, everything would be fine. She found out that this wasn’t true. Working in fashion, she was frustrated by the status quo: “Why can’t the people who make the stuff know the price of the stuff they make?” She quit and went somewhere she had never been before.

She went to the States and started working in a café and a hostel. It was here that she learned that a woman is worth less than a cow in India. She decides to save up 1500$ and go there. She is thinking about teaching women practical skills so that they could earn their own money. She packs the bag Farida calls “trash”.

“I just showed up in India asking who needed help. I was pointed towards Farida. She was working 18 hour shifts with 4 kids and no husband. She was exploited on every level possible.“ Carla Maria tells me. “I asked Farida if I could move in for a month. I didn’t have a plan. But I had a feeling”

Years later Farida is the president of Project Tres, a NGO Carla Maria founded that designs programms with women, giving them agency and sparking ripple effects. Farida has grown her babysitting business enough to employ other women. The idea is simple and powerful. The women in her programms build independence, freedom from violence, and lasting economic security. This way they can lift entire communities with them.

It has been difficult to secure funding. Explaining the work of a German NGO operating in India and Kenya to German bureaucracy has been challenging. “I was told to focus on Ukrainian immigrants once. Funding would have been easier.” Carla Maria refuses to flatten her work so the funding gets easier. She acknowledges that she wouldn't have made it this far without the support of her friends and family.

This is how I found Carla Maria. Looking up from behind a poster she just made. She spontaneously applied for funding from the Tomorrow Bank and got it. Now she is facilitating a workshop series for migrant women in Germany. She describes feeling “a mix of everything: grateful, excited, humbled, and — if I’m being truly transparent — nervous and afraid. In the current times we are living in, the way gender and migration challenges are being handled feels heavier than ever. Because of that, my imposter syndrome is in full bloom.”

Right now Carla Maria is changing the story migrant women in Germany are standing in. She is proposing co-creation, instead of integration. The old story isn’t working. Her vision of Germany is one “that doesn't just tolerate migrants, but actively invites us into the equation of creating new societies.” She is working alongside migrant women with a strong focus on the Global Majority, but not limited to it, treading territory that requires more layers of complexity than the common either/or duality.

She refuses to call her workshops a safe space. “In this polarized world? The best we can do is to be non-judgemental. We’ve internalized truths that aren’t any. We need to hold the complexities of migration, while wars are simultaneously impacting us. Two truths can be valid at the same time while standing together as felt opposites. I mean colours all exist simultaneously on the spectrum, why do we turn everything into little puzzles? I wouldn’t dare call this a safe place. I feel like shitting my pants organizing this. All our struggles boil down to something very simple: navigating being human. I just do the best I can with the tools that I have.”

“Do what you want to do and let it change 1 person” she says “we should throw away the word ‘scale’, we don’t need to ‘scale’ anything. A woman who attended my workshop told me I’d changed the way she viewed her own story. I cried on the spot. This is why I do what I do.”

“I start with myself, and then I go outwards and check if this makes sense in the collective space I work in, and then we continue designing things together. So it's not that I just have my own rules, but I always take myself into account and don't do things from a place of ‘sacrifice for others’. For me the importance of that is to not feel as if I’m "save" anyone. And intuition. Always.” 

Opener | Carla Maria isn’t waiting for permission to go first. She went to the U.S. although no one looking like her was doing what she went there to do. She showed up at Farida’s house in India, asking to stay. That there was no toilet? No problem. She went to the Tomorrow Bank with an idea that wasn’t quite finished. Then she made the poster. She doesn't wait to be invited. The Opener move looks like bravery, but it's the refusal to treat 'permission' as a real condition.

Translator | Carla Maria carries Farida's reality from rural India into German funding applications. Without losing what makes it true. She carries migrant women's reality into a workshop she runs without flattening it into integration-speak. She carries her own origin (fear, domestic violence, responsibility) into a workshop room in Berlin without performing it or hiding it. She carries the truth of "we should throw away the word scale" into rooms that worship scale. All of this wouldn’t have arrived without her.

What have you been translating yourself out of to make it easier?

Stay curious. Stay courageous.

The part of you that has been translating you out of rooms has a name. She thinks she's helping. This Activity Book for Adults Done Giving Up introduces her properly, alongside the two voices that have been waiting for you to listen.

Written by a human. Unpolished. On purpose.