Nuno Tavares
Founder & Chairman at Tours For You. Chair of the Jury.
Born in 1975 in the Azores, he is married and the father of three children. He graduated in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, and began his career in Portuguese telecommunications companies between 1999 and 2003.
At age 27, he became an entrepreneur, founding Tours For You in 2003. Later, he returned to a teenage dream from the late 1980s: telling stories through film. In 2020, he directed and produced the film
The Soul of a Cyclist, conveying a humanist and ecological message that traveled the world.
He defines himself as someone with eclectic interests who appreciates the discomfort of starting something new. He believes that life is "enormous" in what it has to offer, and too short to spend entirely inside the same "professional box."
In recent years, he closely followed several social impact and social entrepreneurship projects and concluded that the best response was to act. Out of that conviction, the
Kindness Award by Tours For You was born. Because kindness, when organized, also changes the world.
Joana Mouta
Holds a Law degree and a European Master's Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation.
During her youth in Lisbon, she observed inequalities in access, opportunities, and power among people and across different spaces. Throughout her academic and professional journey, she had the opportunity to observe and experience that same unequal reality around the world, both inside and outside Europe.
Since 2015, she has dedicated her professional path to experiences tied to innovation and social justice, working with organizations such as APPT21, IPAV, and
Associação Passa Sabi. Currently, she is the Public Partnerships Manager at
Teach For Portugal, where she works to foster collaboration among different stakeholders and contribute to a more equitable education.
Conscious of her privileges, she has always sought to dedicate her life to ideas, ideals, teams, and projects aligned with this worldview, allowing her to contribute to giving a voice to and creating opportunities for underrepresented people and communities, wherever they may be.
It is this conviction that has motivated her throughout her entire path. In addition, she loves learning, traveling, reading, talking with people, eating chocolate, and intersecting the universes of Philosophy, Human Rights, Neuroscience, the Arts, Culture, and Human Behavior.
Santiago Salazar
Co-founder of
Bynd (originally Busy Angels), founded in 2010. For nearly two decades, he served as CEO of multinationals in Portugal and Spain across sectors as diverse as automotive, information systems, logistics, construction, and public works. From that chapter, he, above all, holds onto the responsibility for the thousands of people he led, his first and most direct social commitment.
Later, as a Business Angel, he invested in and collaborated with the Portuguese entrepreneurial ecosystem, sharing his experience with a new generation of young entrepreneurs. As a Venture Capital founder and manager, he gathered capital from over a hundred investors and channeled it into nearly a hundred projects supported and mentored by Bynd.
With an academic background in Industry and Economics, he is dedicated full-time to the Iberian startup ecosystem from its earliest stages. He believes that talent and experience are worth more when put at the service of others, and it is that conviction that brings him to the Kindness Award: contributing so that good ideas, and good people, have the opportunity to build a better world.
Fátima Alves
Fátima Alves is a sociologist, Associate Professor with Habilitation (
Agregação) at
Universidade Aberta, and a researcher at the
Centre for Functional Ecology at the University of Coimbra, where she coordinates the Societies and Environmental Sustainability research group.
Throughout her path, she has sought to understand the relationships between society, nature, and health, paying particular attention to inequalities, social and environmental justice, well-being, and the possibilities for transforming contemporary societies.
Her research has led her to work with different communities, both in Portugal and in other international contexts, valuing dialogue among knowledge, experiences, and ways of understanding the world.
She believes in a science committed to society, capable of listening to different voices, questioning inequalities, and contributing to building fairer, more supportive, and sustainable futures.
António Martins Rodrigues
António is the father of two teenage girls. He holds a Law degree from the Lisbon School of Law of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, and postgraduate degrees in Legal Sciences, Contract Law, and Conflict Mediation. A lawyer since 2004, he is the founder and managing partner of
Legal Partners. He was a volunteer at
Centro São Martinho de Lima (formerly AADS – Association for Support to AIDS Patients), and was a member of
SOS Racismo and the Association for the Cultural Promotion of Children (APCC), through which he was elected to the Board of the National Youth Council. He served as Chair of the General Assembly of the APCC (Association for the Cultural Promotion of Children) and was co-author of the First Human Rights education game published in Portugal,
Direitos à Solta, coordinated by Maria Emília Brederode Santos. He was a board member and President of the Bureau of the General Assembly of the Parents' Association of
Escola Vasco da Gama, Parque das Nações (Lisbon). In 2023, through Legal Partners and in partnership with
Doclisboa, he created the Legalpartners Human Rights Award for documentary cinema (which in 2026 reached its fourth edition).
