Clodomir Santos de Morais (30 September 1928 – 25 March 2016) was a Brazilian sociologist who originated the Organization Workshop (OW) and the associated Activity-based Large Group Capacitation Method (LGCM).

[3][4] In the 1940s and 1950s de Morais worked as a trade unionist and a journalist, becoming a member of the Pernambuco State Assembly and co-founder of the Ligas Camponêsas (Peasant Leagues).

After the end of military rule de Morais returned to Brazil in 1988, answering a call from the University of Brasilia to help in the 'hidden civil war' of unemployment.

It was while working at Ford that he became involved in trade unionism and political activism along with the painter Luis Enjorras Ventura, the educator Dario Lorenzo, the art critic Radha Abramo as well as the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC), who later was to become president of the Republic.

The insights which gave rise to what was eventually to become the Organization Workshop were the unanticipated outcome of a clandestine meeting held by a large group of Peasant League middle managers in an ordinary townhouse, in Recife in 1954, to study Brazilian Agrarian Law, and which Clodomir de Morais attended.

An evaluation conducted six months after that meeting found that participants had made remarkable contributions to their home communities, in some cases in marked contrast to previous behavior.

[9] This insight led Moraes to think about practical exercises where a shared resource base, activity, and the need for analytical thought would stimulate organizational consciousness.

The inspiration for these "boarding" type OWs came from a CEPAL-led course for international economic development experts which Clodomir attended during his studies in Santiago (Chile) in 1965.

[64][65] In 1985 de Morais, then visiting professor in East Germany, returned to Mexico for the official signing of a new tranche of World Bank funding for PRODERITH projects.

[76][77] de Morais ran some initial pilot OWs in Nicaragua until, in December 1980, the Sandinista government caught cold feet about going national.

[78] The further spread of the OW in the 1980s was due partly to de Morais visiting other Latin American countries where he gave talks and lectures and attended seminars at a number of universities,[79][10][80][81][82] but mainly due to the fact that Honduras in general and the Honduran Guanchias center[83][84][85] in particular had become a magnet[86] for field and middle management personnel and members of the campesino membership enterprises from other Latin American countries as well as from the Caribbean.

They were sponsored to participate in the Honduran workshops by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA) and by the Foundation for Applied Capacitation and Research in Agrarian Reform (CIARA).

[87][88] Those participants "reproduced the same type of experiments in Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Dominica and Belize.

[92] This left de Morais with no option but to go to Africa himself:[93] he ran 'in situ' course OWs successively in Guinea Bissau, Angola, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe.

[94] In 1986, Ian Cherrett,[95] then Hivos representative for southern Africa, and Cephas Muropa,[96] with the support of Glen Forest Training Centre (Harare, Zim.

That was the moment when Hivos, through Cherrett, invited the Social Psychologists Isabel and Iván Labra, with long, hands-on experience of running workshops in Latin America, to come to Zimbabwe.

[108][109] The Supervisory Development Authority for Amazônia (SUDAM) (1996–2002) reports that, with IATTERMUND's 'APRENDER-FAZENDO' (Learn by doing) methodology, the POLONOROESTE program in 1992–3 ran OWs in São Paulo, Paraíba and Alagoas.

[111] Correia estimates that, based on IATTERMUND and different state, municipality, as well as MST sources which she researched, in the decade from 1988 to 1998, "around 100,000 people participated in various OW events in Brazil".

[117] After the Workers' Party/PT electoral victory in 2003, large regional and national-scale OW 'PRONAGER' programs such as those that took place under the previous Fernando Henrique Cardoso's Brazilian Social Democracy Party dwindled both in size and in number.