RAN Community Action Grants provide funding for Indigenous and frontline communities and grassroots initiatives fighting to keep forests standing, protect the climate, and uphold human rights.
Top priority is given to:
1. Projects emphasizing grassroots organizing, education, training, and/or capacity building to develop skills, increase awareness, and/or build alliances towards protection of, and increased community control over, local resources.
2. Projects emphasizing community-driven, strategic activities (including mobilizations, storytelling/documentary initiatives, women-led projects, etc.) that support local resistance to destructive development activities such as logging, oil extraction, and the expansion of monoculture plantations and/or that support scaling-up and implementing local visions and solutions.
3. Projects supporting Indigenous and traditional communities’ rights and securing or maintaining land rights recognition (demarcation of territory, participatory mapping, resource inventories and management plans, meetings with neighboring communities, territorial patrols/Indigenous Guard programs, etc.).
Also supported:
4. Environmentally and socially sound sustainable economic alternative initiatives.
5. Travel and other opportunities that amplify community voices in regional, national, and international forums and provide access to decision makers.
6. Field studies and original research that are used to hold companies accountable for their on-the-ground activities.
7. Projects supporting increased safety and security for threatened Land Defenders.
8. Seed money for emerging community-based, grassroots organizations.
Community Action Grants is an advisor-led, rights-based approach to grantmaking rooted in RAN’s overall partnerships model. To provide additional guidance, applications may be evaluated on the following criteria:
1. Applicant’s capacity to carry out proposed activities.
2. Project strategy and urgency, including well-defined objectives and planned activities.
3. Scale and scope of community participation, including, when applicable, that the community where the project is centered and/or that will be impacted by the initiative be engaged in the decision-making process related to the activities.
4. Ecological/cultural significance of the forest/local environment.
5. Commitment to honor and uphold diversity and equity.
6. Project activities would be significantly enhanced by securing grant funds.
Although grants are made in all regions, geographic priority areas are Southeast Asia and South and North America, and projects led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color are prioritized.
Community Action Grants is not able to consider unsolicited applications and does not support individual, governmental, or exclusively academic projects. Grants are generally in the range of $5,000-$15,000. Certain components of projects with larger budgets can be funded when those components significantly contribute to the project’s final outcome.
A Word version of the application is available upon request in Bahasa Indonesia, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. If the application is urgent, please make this clear when it is submitted, and we will do our best to respond in a timely manner.
