Resources, knowledge, time, land, and care
Whether you are an individual, a school, a company, a researcher, an artist, a foundation, a landowner, or a volunteer, there is a meaningful place for you in ALUME's work.
Participate
The future is shaped by the choices we make today. Join us in restoring ecosystems, empowering communities, and building practical models that help nature and people flourish together. Be welcome.
Partnerships & Support
Join us in restoring ecosystems, empowering communities, and building practical models that help nature and people flourish together. Every pathway below connects to active or developing work across ALUME.
Support a dedicated restoration area and accompany its development over time. Partners receive documented planting records, monitoring updates, biodiversity observations, satellite imagery, and a Restoration Certificate. Our reporting is designed to evolve alongside internationally recognised sustainability frameworks as our monitoring programme expands.
Through consortium and grant partnerships, funding supports regenerative work across reforestation, green science, culture, and ecological art. ALUME collaborates with institutional partners to co-fund and implement projects that restore ecosystems, build knowledge, and strengthen community engagement, with transparent reporting shared openly with every partner.
Guided ecological visits, community workshops, and the documentation and exchange of traditional knowledge across Ilhéus, Uruçuca, Itacaré, Itabuna, and other regions of Bahia. We aim to make these activities freely accessible to local schools and community groups whenever funding allows.
Fazenda ALUME is an active, multi-year restoration site with defined planting zones and ongoing fieldwork. We invite research partnerships in agroforestry, soil science, hydrology, and biodiversity, offering full site access, co-authorship opportunities, and flexible short- or long-term agreements.
Do you have degraded land in the Atlantic Forest region? ALUME can become the steward of your territory—bringing native and exotic tree planting, agroforestry design, ecological monitoring, and community integration to land you own, without requiring its transfer.
Fazenda ALUME actively expands its biodiversity network through seed and sapling exchanges with local farms, botanical gardens, and conservation centers. We share climate-adapted species, support regional ecosystem restoration, and scale sustainable agroforestry practices. Partner with us to diversify genetic stock and strengthen regional biodiversity.
Join ALUME through artistic residencies, cultural exchange, workshops, exhibitions, publications, and creative practices that bring ecology, science, community, and the Atlantic Forest into meaningful dialogue.
Move sustainability beyond presentations through restoration sponsorship, employee experiences, ecological learning, transparent impact reporting, and long-term partnerships connected to real work at Fazenda ALUME.
Support the shared infrastructure behind restoration, science, education, culture, community programmes, and the practical work required to help living systems recover.
Volunteer With ALUME
ALUME is a young regenerative institute in Brazil's Atlantic Forest—one of the most threatened and biodiverse places on Earth. We need people, on the ground at Fazenda ALUME or online from anywhere in the world. Whatever you give enters a real record, feeds real science, and outlasts your stay. This is not voluntourism.
Why ALUME, and why now
You've read about deforestation. Signed the petitions, watched the documentaries, felt the quiet helplessness. ALUME is the opposite of helpless: 42 hectares of degraded land in Bahia being turned, tree by tree, back into living Atlantic Forest—and a working model built to be copied far beyond our borders.
On-site, you plant trees whose survival is tracked and reported. Online, you produce knowledge, materials, and campaigns that reach sponsors, researchers, and producers across Brazil. If it isn't real, we don't ask for it.
Fazenda ALUME is an active research site, and our grants and partnerships depend on honest evidence. A soil sample, a translated protocol, a grant draft, a photograph—each becomes part of a record other people rely on.
You'll work beside local mateiros, farmers, and Aderno and Aritaguá residents who are co-authors of our methods, not their subjects. You leave with friendships, skills, a reference letter that means something—and a real relationship to a living place.
Choose Your Path
| Path | On-Site | Online |
|---|---|---|
| Where | Fazenda ALUME, Ilhéus, Bahia | Anywhere in the world |
| Typical length | 1–4 weeks | 12–24 weeks |
| Best for | People who want to live it—hands in the soil, part of daily life | People with a specific skill and a few hours a week over a season |
| You get | Accommodation, shared meals, field access, community | Mentorship, real portfolio work, a global network |
| Everyone gets | Reference letter · knowledge exchange · a contribution that lasts | Reference letter · knowledge exchange · a contribution that lasts |
On hours, once—so we don't repeat it 21 times: on-site placements typically run 1–4 weeks; online placements typically run 12–24 weeks—longer because there's no travel, a few hours a week across a season. Where a role genuinely works differently, it says so.
On-Site Roles
On-site roles are defined placements—deeper or more specific than the general help covered by Workaway. You live on the farm, eat at our table, and own a real piece of the work.
Live and work in the heart of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. Contribute to our mission while learning sustainable practices and connecting with nature.
Learn sustainable practices through direct experience and mentorship.
Build meaningful relationships with like-minded individuals from around the world.
Live in harmony with nature and experience the healing power of the Atlantic Forest.
Current accommodation, meals, schedules, and minimum-stay logistics are confirmed through our Workaway listing or directly with the ALUME team before arrival.
Take ownership of one restoration zone for a full planting cycle—tracking which trees thrive and which struggle, adjusting spacing and species mix, and keeping records clean enough to feed ALUME’s monitoring reports. It’s the closest you can get to being personally responsible for a patch of forest coming back.
Right for you if: You’d rather own an outcome than tick off tasks, you have the stamina for outdoor work, and you notice a struggling seedling before anyone points it out.
Improve how the nursery propagates and tracks its seedlings—a clearer propagation calendar, better record-keeping, or simply writing down what already works so it doesn’t live in one person’s head. Every tree we plant starts here.
Right for you if: You like turning “we sort of know how we do this” into a system anyone could follow. Botanical interest helps; a systems mind matters more.
Do the fieldwork behind every claim ALUME makes to a scientist, sponsor, or certifier—soil sampling, canopy surveys, species counts, groundwater measurement—following the science team’s protocols. Your data is the proof our whole model stands on.
Right for you if: You have patience for careful, repetitive measurement, you’re comfortable outdoors in heat, mud, and insects, and you’d rather get a reading right than get it fast.
Join as a resident or visiting artist whose practice engages with regeneration, ecology, or the forest—make work during your stay and, where it fits, share it with the community through an open studio, workshop, or small showing. Art is how restoration becomes a story people feel, not just a fact they read.
Right for you if: You have an active practice in any medium and you want to be part of daily farm and community life, not just a private studio.
Be a formal bridge between ALUME and the local community—coordinating the seed and plant exchange, organising workshop logistics, and making sure local knowledge and concerns genuinely reach our planning instead of being collected and forgotten.
Right for you if: You’re rooted in Aderno, Aritaguá, or the wider Ilhéus region and trusted locally, and you’re comfortable with light admin—scheduling, notes, follow-up.
Help design or deliver ALUME’s educational work—school visits, workshop curricula, or short courses on agroforestry, ecology, and circular economy—bringing real teaching craft rather than improvising on the day.
Right for you if: You’ve taught at any level, you can translate technical ideas for a general or young audience, and you have patience for a young institute still building its curriculum.
Connect ALUME’s work to the wider movements it belongs to—environmental justice, waste-picker rights, land rights—and bring a critical outside eye to whether our community relationships are as genuine as we intend them to be.
Right for you if: You’ve done grassroots or advocacy work, you’re willing to ask uncomfortable questions, and you value real community voice over good optics.
Document real life and work on the farm, in residencies and workshops—the honest material that becomes everything from a sponsor report to the post that brings the next volunteer here. This role can also be done partly online, editing footage sent from the field.
Right for you if: You have a storytelling eye and you can work with real, imperfect conditions instead of a staged shoot.
Online Roles
Online roles are specific skills given remotely—a few hours a week across a season. You'll get real work for your portfolio, direct mentorship, and a genuine hand in a project that's going somewhere.
Contribute to our mission through digital skills, content creation, and remote support. Make a difference from anywhere in the world.
Create educational content, blog posts, and social media content about sustainable living and plant medicine.
Help with website maintenance, technical support, and digital infrastructure development.
Translate content between Portuguese and English to make our resources accessible to more people.
Conduct research on sustainable practices, plant medicine, and environmental conservation.
Support an active research question from anywhere—literature review, organising and cleaning data, or basic analysis—working directly with ALUME’s science lead. You help turn fieldwork into evidence that funders and scientists will actually trust.
Right for you if: You have research training in ecology, biology, or a related field, sharp attention to detail, and comfort working async with a small, remote-friendly team.
AMI³ is an early-stage concept, not yet a running project. the idea of turning collected waste into community materials, starting hyper-local. These roles help test the very first steps. You would be a founding contributor to something unproven: high ambiguity, high meaning. Come only if that excites rather than frustrates you.
Research and test early formulations for building materials made from recovered waste—recycled-plastic composites, plastic-aggregate mixes, additives from pyrolysis by-products like biochar—and document honestly what holds up and what fails.
Right for you if: You have a materials-science, chemistry, or civil-engineering background and you’re at peace with trial and error, where most tests fail before one works.
Help think through the mechanical and control systems behind AMI³’s earliest equipment—starting as simply as a manual granulation setup—with an eye on what could later be automated.
Right for you if: You have a mechatronics, mechanical, or electrical background and you’re genuinely drawn to scrappy, early-stage hardware over finished factory lines.
Design the process side of turning collected waste into usable feedstock, even at tiny scale—sorting, quality control, simple testing protocols—so a manual pilot could scale later without starting over.
Right for you if: You have an industrial or process-engineering background and you like designing a sensible system before anyone reaches for machinery.
Advise on what it would really take to print or mould from recycled-waste feedstock—including honest guidance on what Brazil’s existing construction-3D-printing companies already do, so AMI³ never rebuilds something that exists down the road.
Right for you if: You have hands-on 3D-printing experience—large-format construction printing is a bonus, not a must—and you’ll give straight technical opinions on an idea that isn’t built yet.
Contribute design thinking for structures that could one day be built from waste-derived and natural materials—bioconstruction, passive cooling, forms that work with Bahia’s climate rather than against it.
Right for you if: You have an architecture or bioconstruction background and you’re energised by designing for materials that don’t exist as off-the-shelf products yet.
Plan and produce content—written, photo, or short video—about the planting work, for sponsors, researchers, and the public, in a voice that’s honest about what’s proven and what’s still early. Your work is often the first thing a future partner or volunteer ever sees of ALUME.
Right for you if: You write well, ideally bilingual Portuguese/English, and you have a feel for what actually makes something worth reading—not just posting to post.
Own ALUME’s day-to-day presence—posting rhythm, replying to comments and messages, and tracking what genuinely lands. Help a small institute build a real, engaged audience from the ground up.
Right for you if: You’ve run social accounts before—a genuinely engaged personal account counts—you value consistency over flash, and you’d rather build a slow, honest following than chase virality.
Create the visual materials behind education, fundraising, and communications—from a one-page flyer to a full sponsor deck—that hold their own next to any serious organisation’s work. Good design is often the difference between a grant read and a grant ignored.
Right for you if: You have design skills and a portfolio, and a feel for a brand that’s warm and grounded, not corporate or glossy.
Build and maintain ALUME’s digital tools—front-end, back-end, light data work, or UX/UI—wherever the real need is, in a small, evolving stack rather than a mature product team.
Right for you if: You have practical web or data skills—front-end, back-end, or data science; no need for all three—and you’re comfortable making sense of an early-stage, under-documented setup.
Turn raw farm, workshop, and residency footage into short, watchable videos for social media and reports—the format that travels furthest and brings the most people back to the mission.
Right for you if: You can edit—personal reels or TikTok edits absolutely count—you have an eye for pacing, and you’re fluent in fast, social-first tools like CapCut.
Track public and private funding calls that fit ALUME’s real stage, check each against actual eligibility, and help draft a first-pass application—usually scoped around seeing one full application through from research to submission. This is the work that quite literally keeps the forest funded.
Right for you if: You have research discipline, you write clearly and honestly—no overselling what ALUME hasn’t done yet—and you have patience for bureaucratic detail.
Support the day-to-day—volunteer scheduling, basic financial record-keeping, keeping shared documents in order—the quiet work that makes everything else possible.
Right for you if: You’re reliable above all, organised, and at home with background work that rarely gets applause but is always missed when it’s gone.
Knowledge Community Researcher
Join our community of researchers and contribute to our growing knowledge base of plant medicine and sustainable living practices through research, documentation, content creation, editing, and community knowledge sharing.
Research traditional and modern uses of medicinal plants, their properties, and applications.
Document sustainable living practices, eco-construction, and regenerative agriculture.
Research conservation strategies, biodiversity, and forest stewardship practices.
Document traditional knowledge, cultural practices, and Indigenous wisdom.
Duration
Flexible
Time Commitment
5–15 hours/week
Requirements
Research skills, writing ability
Benefits
Publication credits, networking
Who We Are Looking For
Students, professionals, researchers, artists, career-changers—on-site or online. Some volunteers arrive with years of experience; others bring curiosity and the determination to be useful. We especially value skills in ecology, agriculture, engineering, materials science, biology, communications, design, fundraising, administration, and community work—but we read every application individually, and heart counts as much as credentials.
What We Provide
Accommodation, shared meals, and full field access—current stay logistics are kept up to date on our Workaway listing.
Current Workaway details →A formal letter reflecting your specific contribution—field or laptop—that names what you actually did.
Access to ALUME’s researchers, partners, and past volunteers, on-site and online.
Hands-on learning in restoration, science, and regenerative practice—and mentorship on whatever you came to build.
Every tree planted, protocol written, or grant researched keeps working long after you’ve gone.
Volunteer Recognition
Our volunteers become part of the wider ALUME community—whether they came through Workaway, on-site, or online. Long-term contributors may receive invitations to future residencies, events, and collective actions, continued participation in the community, and priority consideration for future paid collaborations as projects grow. Our goal isn't to host volunteers. It's to grow lifelong collaborators.
How to Apply
There's a single application form for every role, on-site and online. In it, tell us:
We care far more about honesty than polish. We normally reply within two weeks.
