The article's purpose is to reveal the discourse enunciated by the workers of the Comupra - Community Counsel United pro Ribeiro de Abreu, a NGO from Belo Horizonte, about the positive (pleasure) or negative (suffering) meaning they attribute to their work. Besides being a factor of illness and health, the work is central in individual and social lives and it is one of the fields of study presently in expansion. Yet, in the NGOs from the Third Sector, it is still not much studied. Semi-structured interviews were the main knowledge collection tool. The obtained information was treated by means of discourse analysis. Six workers from the Comupra were interviewed. The analyses revealed that the positive meaning of the work surpass the negative meaning. The situations in which pleasure occurs are taken as more important than those provoking suffering, showing that the choice for working in the third sector is associated to an expectation of individual and community changes.
work; meaning; pleasure; suffering; Non-governmental Organizations