By Through our relationship with Global Greengrants Fund, we’ve helped recently to make a dozen grants to projects spanning 3 continents. These communities are on the frontlines of efforts around the world by people to maintain control over their own resources and protect the natural systems that sustain their way of life.
South America
Xavante Wara Association
$5,000 to support an emergency gathering to bring together leaders from 34 villages across Xavante territory in the Brazilian Cerrado to directly address the false information and pressure from large landowners interested in expanding soy plantations, which have negative impacts on Xavante traditional territory, culture, and health.
Mobilization of Indigenous People of the Cerrado (MOPIC)
$5,000 to support a gathering with more than 100 participants from 30 Indigenous nationalities to form an alliance between communities from the Brazilian Cerrado with those from the Xingu basin in the Amazon who are increasingly impacted and threatened by soy expansion.
Associação Metareilá do Povo Indígena Suruí
$3,000 for travel costs of 4 members of the Surui Indigenous community to attend the World Social Forum in Belem in the Brazilian Amazon to organize with other communities and share information about the Surui’s innovative projects, including extractive reserves that provide income while protecting the forest, collaborations with rubber tappers, and a GIS mapping project of traditional territory working with Google Earth technology.
Confederation of Indigenous Women of Bolivia
$5,000 in emergency assistance to this organization, the leadership of which is working under death threats while leading the struggle to protect the rights of, and return lands to, Indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon.
Community Development Council
$3,000 to support ongoing grassroots organizing that recently resulted in a victory keeping Canadian mining company Copper Mesa from developing a massive mine that would have a devastated the Intag region of northwest Ecuador, including a protected cloud forest reserve.
Achual Sustainable Harvest Project
$2,000 in support for the Achual community’s permaculture project in the Peruvian Amazon, which will produce tropical fruits with maximum biodiversity, provide income security, reforest depleted areas, and help secure native-status recognition for 4,000 acres of rainforest territory.
North America
Black Mesa Water Coalition
$5,000 to support organizing work amongst the Hopi & Dine communities to oppose coal mining and power generation on Indigenous lands in the Four Corners region of the United States.
Read about the action supported by this grant.
Justice for the Lubicon
$5,000 in support of the Lubicon Lake Indian Nation, a small aboriginal society living in northern Alberta, Canada who have been struggling for over sixty years to gain recognition of their traditional territory and are developing a campaign to pressure TransCanada and its financiers, which are planning a pipeline through Lubicon territory without the community’s consent.
Take action to support the Lubicon!
Wounaan Land Tenure Project
$4,370 to support the Wounaan Indigenous community’s efforts to stop cattle ranchers from taking over their communal land in Panama’s dense eastern rainforests by obtaining legal title to their traditional territory.
The Foundation for the Promotion of Indigenous Knowledge
$3,000 to cover travel costs for Panamanian Kuna leader Onel Masardule to attend international climate change negotiations, and corresponding protests, in Poland to push for a series of worldwide Indigenous-led ecosystem assessments, based on traditional knowledge, aimed at empowering communities to develop their own adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Asia-Pacific
Beuro Otemo Integrated Conservation and Development (BOICAD)
$3,500 to support a massive awareness campaign by the Baruga People, customary owners of the rich tropical rainforest along the Musa River in Papua New Guinea, which is threatened by a proposed 280,000 hectare acacia plantation (used for furniture) and a proposed nickel mine upstream from Baruga land.
Friends of Mamba
$3,500 to support Friends of Mamba’s effort to stop the construction of a palm oil mill planned on the Mamba River in Papua New Guinea, which would cause severe oxygen depletion in the river creating dead zones and drive the clearing of primary forests for plantations.