Pathways · Conservation
Instituto Pró-Onça
My pathway to this organization runs through family. My cousin, Jan F. Kamler, is a wildlife biologist, and it is through his work that I came to know Pró-Onça.
Jan has spent his career among the world's carnivores. He has been affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) at the University of Oxford since 2004, and from 2015 to 2018 he coordinated Panthera's leopard program across Southeast Asia, surveying the Critically Endangered Indochinese leopard in Cambodia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and the Javan leopard on Java. His fieldwork runs from Brazil to Cambodia, Laos, Bhutan, Indonesia, South Africa, Poland, Texas, and Kansas, across jaguars, leopards, dholes, golden jackals, clouded leopards, and bat-eared foxes. He has contributed to IUCN Red List assessments for leopards and dholes, and co-authored work reading jaguar prey preference against the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions. Since 2023 he has contributed to Pró-Onça's work in Brazil.
The work
Pró-Onça is a Brazilian nonprofit founded in 2023 by conservation biologist Letícia Benavalli, who directs it from Cocalzinho de Goiás. Its ground is the Cerrado — the second-largest biome in South America and the most biodiverse savanna on Earth, which feeds water into the continent's major river basins. Only a small fraction of it is protected, and roughly three-quarters sits on private land. That single fact shapes everything: the work has to begin with the people who live there.
So it does. They restore the ecological corridors that reconnect fragmented habitat — collecting native seed, raising seedlings, monitoring biodiversity by camera trap — across the region linking Cocalzinho de Goiás, Corumbá de Goiás, and Pirenopólis. Rural women lead that restoration, building both the landscape and their own livelihoods as they go. As the organization puts it: “When a jaguar disappears, countless other species vanish too.” The jaguar is the thread; pulling it holds the whole weave together.
Four pillars
Wildlife conservation
Habitat restoration and monitoring for endangered species — particularly large carnivores like jaguars and pumas — alongside work easing conflict between those carnivores and the people who share their range.
Empowering communities
Training rural women, young people, and landowners as conservation leaders, and building sustainable livelihoods on the knowledge they gain.
Building partnerships
Working alongside local communities, governments, landowners, and other organizations — with them rather than around them.
Long-term impact
Science-based restoration built to last, aimed at a durable coexistence between people and wildlife rather than a temporary reprieve.
In their own words
Their own introduction to the work — how hope, nature, and people come together for a better future.
Restoring jaguar corridors in Goiás — the corridor project, told by the people doing it.
What they have done so far
- 5 hectares of Cerrado habitat restored
- 1,300+ native seedlings grown
- 26 mammal species and 11 individual jaguars documented
- 15 rural women trained in restoration and stewardship
- 200+ young people engaged in conservation
- Featured on PANORAMA: Solutions for a Healthy Planet
Figures as reported by the organization. Letícia Benavalli's work has been recognized with a Rolex Explorers Club Grant and covered in Forbes.
Supporting the current round
Pró-Onça is raising funds through Ma Earth's third funding round, which runs until 22 July 2026. The round shares a $500,000 matching pool across roughly 200 grassroots projects, and it is distributed quadratically — meaning the number of people who give counts for more than the size of any single gift. A modest contribution genuinely carries weight here; many small hands move it further than a few large ones.
Support the round → Give any time →
The Ma Earth round is time-limited; the every.org route (US tax-deductible, via The Resource Foundation) stays open year-round.