 The DEMA operates in Pará State, a region in northeast Brazil with significant deforestation from mining, cattle farming and illegal timber extraction, with a history of land conflicts. The DEMA fund was set up in 2004 to help communities to organize themselves, claim their stewardship rights based on historical ties to Amazon forest territories, and invest in its sustainable management to improve their livelihoods. So far, the fund has invested in almost 500 projects involving 78,500 people from 1,900 remote and socially excluded forest communities. The fund is hosted by the Brazilian NGO FASE, Federácio Des Olgas Para Assistência Social e Educacional. FASE provides the administration systems and technical support for the fund. The fund was set up with an endowment from auctioning illegally logged timber and a contribution from the Ford Foundation. The DEMA fund now manages almost $6 million, attracting donors that want to reduce deforestation, such as the Amazon fund, the Climate and Land Use Alliance and a network of foundations. It also receives compensation funds awarded by the public attorney for deforestation and social responsibility finance from the corporate sector. Other concerns around proper use of funds lead to onerous requirements, such as showing receipts for all transactions. This is challenging given the remoteness of the communities the fund works with. Could there not be benchmark costs for core activities instead? After all, the communities themselves hold their own project managers highly accountable for any wasted resources. The DEMA fund focuses on geographically remote communities largely excluded from other development programs, supporting their rights to protect the forests on which their livelihoods depend and to be involved in decisions that affect them. The fund's executive committee and the steering committees for each sub-fund include representatives from the social movements and communities it seeks to reach, particularly women, the Zingu indigenous people and the Afro-Brazilian Kilombola community. They participate in setting funding criteria and oversee the selection of projects. FASE provides technical advice on the committees while donors can object to any projects that they do not wish to fund. There are four sub-funds within the DEMA fund. Three are specifically for communities and those communities are represented in their own steering committee. A general fund can issue thematic calls, such as for agroecology projects, reaching subsistence communities not covered by other windows and responding to strategic opportunities. Most grants are between $1,000 and $9,000, with the women's fund having a cap of $3,000. To apply, a community organization must have at least five families, be over two years old and be recommended by two other community groups. The organization must also commit to continue their work for three years after the project and find 20% co-financing to ensure the sustainability of the investment. The fund provides support to the communities via volunteers from the social movements themselves. They mobilize the communities to organize, develop a project idea, deliver it, report results and provide regular accounts. These volunteers run two workshops a year, bringing the communities with projects together to report on progress and share challenges and solutions. This peer-to-peer support has led to cross-learning as well as high levels of accountability on the effective use of the funds. FASE helps the fund maintain transparency. All documents are available on the website and there is a database detailing investments with a community profile, finance and results. But the remoteness of the communities and their limited experience in project management combined with stringent donor requirements means that half the fund's costs go on technical support and administration. The performance of the fund overall is assessed each year by the advisory group. This is made up of representatives from the social movement and FASE. The DEMO fund is proud of what has been achieved. In the last five years, its support has helped communities increase their income as well as restore over 3,000 hectares of forest. This is building communities long-term capability to innovate. The DEMO fund believes aggregating communities priorities for sustainable forest livelihoods, helping them to gain agency and voice to tackle underlying power relations driving deforestation, climate vulnerability and poverty, and providing donors with a means to fund at scale represents a significant departure from business's usual development by NGOs or the government.