The Opaoká Institute is comprised of individuals of diverse nationalities, academic backgrounds, and professional and personal experiences, dedicated to working with sociobiodiversity and corporate, social, environmental, and territorial governance. They believe in education as the driving force behind the transformation of our realities and in intercultural dialogue as the path forward. It is a space for confluence and collaboration among individuals with backgrounds in training educators and indigenous agroforestry agents, advising family farmers and associations of women farmers and agroforestry workers on organizing solidarity-based marketing, providing training practices and processes in meditation and integrative and complementary therapies for comprehensive health, fostering intercultural dialogue, and creating spaces for communication, culture, and art.

Opaoká is the name of one of the great ancestral mothers in the Candomblé tradition, who becomes the mother of Oxóssi and, in Brazil, is identified with the jackfruit tree. Our institute was founded in 2008 with the aim of building cooperation networks between Brazil and Africa that valued the diverse contributions of knowledge among Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities, public administrators, and NGO technicians and international cooperation partners. We operated as an informal collective, pooling our diverse experiences and aligning our dreams and expectations, until 2018, when we formalized the institute as a legal entity.