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Frontline Communities: Where Small Grants Have a Huge Impact

Indigenous and frontline communities are the best stewards of the world’s rainforests and the best organizers against climate change. History has proven this time and again — and that is why RAN created the Community Action Grants program in 1993.

RAN Community Action Grants provide crucial and rapid funding for people fighting in their own communities across the globe to protect millions of acres of forest, to keep millions of tons of carbon in the ground, and to uphold the rights and self-determination of local communities who know best how to preserve their lands and the environment.

Direct Support to Grassroots Leadership

Indigenous and frontline communities suffer disproportionate impacts on their health, livelihoods, and culture from the effects of global climate change and from destructive and invasive extractive industry mega-projects. From plantation expansion into rainforests to mountaintop removal coal mining, from animal poaching to illegal land grabs, from massive water-source contamination to carbon pollution from profit-driven land management—these communities know these threats because they live with the environmental impact and they witness the costs in human rights violations and species extinction.

That is why RAN’s Community Action Grants are designed specifically to strengthen the capacity of Indigenous and frontline communities and to support grassroots leadership. Because Indigenous and frontline activists know how to co-exist with natural resources, and they know how to organize to protect the planet and their communities.

With your support, we can create a stronger global movement to protect our planet.