Sembrando Sentido
Issel Masses, Founder & Executive Director
Alumni Lab
Sembrando Sentido advances transparent and accountable governance, starting in Puerto Rico, by demystifying public spending and equipping communities with the insights, tools, and strategies to oversee public resources and influence decisions affecting their lives.
Year Founded: 2019
Sembrando Sentido’s mission is to collectively transform government structures to ensure the equitable use of public resources for vulnerable communities by demystifying public spending and strengthening community understanding, action and oversight.
Sembrando Sentido creates and combines technology, research, and advocacy tools to make public spending transparent, accessible, understandable and actionable. By opening government data and identifying structural weaknesses in how public funds are allocated and managed, we generate evidence that reveals the social, economic, and environmental consequences of mismanagement and inequitable investment. We translate these insights into policy recommendations, civic tools, and data platforms that allow communities, journalists, and civil society organizations to track public resources and organize to influence decision-making processes. By strengthening community knowledge, participation, and collective action, Sembrando Sentido helps shift incentives toward greater transparency, accountability, and more equitable public investment.
Sembrando Sentido was founded in 2019 to address the deep lack of transparency and accountability surrounding public spending in Puerto Rico. After decades of fiscal crisis, corruption scandals, and limited public access to government data, communities lacked the tools needed to understand how resources were used or meaningfully participate in decisions affecting them. Drawing on founder Issel Masses’ experience in global governance research and public finance, the organization was created to bridge the gap between complex public systems and community agency.
Sembrando Sentido fuses technology, research, and advocacy to make government spending understandable and actionable, helping position communities at the center of the decisions that affect them and the funds used to address them. Its vision is a Puerto Rico where transparent, equitable, and inclusive decision-making prevails, dismantling longstanding colonial structures of exclusion and extraction while strengthening democratic accountability.
Issel Masses
Founder & Executive Director
