Protect an Acre Grants

Pueblo Originario Kichwa de Sarayaku

$10,000 to support Pueblo Originario Kichwa de Sarayaku’s 7 person delegation attending Climate Week in New York City to share lessons learned and engage people through events and dialogues around next steps to secure long term protection for the Upper Amazon through Indigenous-led solutions. Sarayaku’s successful efforts to stop oil activities in their traditional territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon over decades has kept an estimated 100 million barrels of oil in the ground, a de-facto no-go-zone beneath 330,000 acres of standing primary, roadless rainforest.

Articulação Nacional das Mulheres Indígenas Guerreiras da Ancestralidade (ANMIGA)

Conservación Alto Amazonas

$12,500 to support 3 Yurua communities within the 10 million acre Alto Purús Landscape, one of the largest intact ecosystems in the upper Amazon in Southeast Peru, that are threatened by a new, illegal road which could open previously inaccessible forests with potentially devastating impacts on the ecosystems and the people who depend on them for survival. This project is updating 3 communities’ land title, which was previously done in the 1990s using outdated methods that did not include fieldwork to mark boundaries and create formal, accurate maps, which the current process will correct. Through this project, community members, including women, were trained, and compensated as members of the demarcation team together with titling specialists and the updated land titles strengthen ongoing territorial defense efforts.

Digital Democracy

$20,000 to contribute to travel costs for 40 Indigenous participants from 14 countries & 4 continents traveling to the Ecuadorian Amazon to attend a gathering of members of the Earth Defenders Toolkit network to be in community with one another, share strategies, learn from each other’s struggles, and build collective power to protect their territories and cultural legacies. The Earth Defenders Toolkit is a collaborative space for Indigenous and frontline communities and their allies to connect and learn from each other, as well as have access to and ownership of free digital tools in local languages that can be used for mapping territory, data collecting and monitoring, storytelling, and securely collaborating and sharing information within communities and with partners.

Mujeres Amazónicas (Women Defenders of the Amazon)

$20,000 to support Mujeres Amazónicas for several Indigenous women-led events and mobilizations in the Ecuadorian Amazon city of Puyo organized around International Women’s Day and highlighting Indigenous women’s leadership in the resistance to extractive industries on Indigenous territories. Additionally grant funds are supporting the Mujeres Amazónicas managed emergency health fund, which is continuing to provide Covid related support to women land defenders and their families in remote villages throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Black and Indigenous Liberation Movement

$25,000 to contribute to supporting participation of more than 100 Black and Indigenous participants from across the Americas attending a weeklong Anti-Mining Camp in the Kichwa community of Serena in Napo in the Ecuadorian Amazon. To combat extractivism, the Anti-Mining Camp is providing an opportunity for the Black and Indigenous Liberation Movement network to embark on a joint community organizing, capacity building, and storytelling journey as part of efforts to develop collective grassroots anti-mining strategies.

Organización Waorani de Pastaza (OWAP)

$5,000 to support Indigenous leader from Ecuador, Nemonte Nenquimo, the co-founder of the Indigenous organization Ceibo Alliance and the first woman leader of the Waorani people to attend Climate Week in New York City to share lessons learned and engage people through events and dialogues around next steps to secure long term protection for the Upper Amazon through Indigenous-led solutions. Nenquimo is taking part in Climate Week events in New York this year in the wake of a historic climate victory: the passing of a national referendum in Ecuador to protect the Yasuní rainforest, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth.

Yasunidos

$10,000 to support national level organizing and media campaigns as part of the successful Ecuadorian referendum on whether to keep the country’s largest oil fields, the “Ishpingo – Tiputini – Tambococha” (ITT), known as block 43, permanently in the ground. Block 43 covers the northeast part of Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon, among the most biodiverse places on Earth and home to Indigenous peoples living in isolation.