$5,000 to support the Indigenous Media Makers #Stop Line 3 project, which is providing funds to purchase, transport, and distribute fully prepped media gear kits, as well as to provide software access and training to several different Indigenous frontline organizations to support media and storytelling work regarding their urgent efforts resisting the Line 3 pipeline.
$7,500 to support the Indigenous-led Tiny House Warriors project to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline, which would ship more than 890,000 barrels per year of highly-polluting tar sands crude oil to the coast of British Columbia, from crossing unceded Secwepemc Territory through building ten tiny houses along the 518 km Trans Mountain pipeline route to assert Secwepemc Law and jurisdiction.
$1,000 to support UK Tar Sands Network’s work in solidarity with frontline communities from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf Coast resisting fossil fuel extraction. The network engages in and supports creative solidarity mobilizations in the UK and Europe and provides communications support and helps cultivate international media contacts regarding stories connecting Indigenous struggles related to fossil fuels and finance campaigns.
$2,500 to support a local and regional campaign to shut down the Merrimack Generating Station, the last major coal-fired power plant in New England without a shutdown date. This plant has been polluting the air and water and making the people of Bow, New Hampshire sick for decades and shutting it down would mitigate millions of potential metric tons of CO2 from being released in the future.
$7,500 to support the Indigenous Youth Leadership Training, a virtual training that is bringing together 40+ North American Indigenous youth leaders, many from communities engaged in frontline fossil fuel campaigns, to learn from Indigenous mentors and experts in the fields of digital media/storytelling, food sovereignty, political sovereignty, outdoor survival skills, decolonized community care, and campaign development.
$27,500 to support the launch of a global campaign to raise visibility and resources for Indigenous women across the Amazon fighting threats to their peoples’ lands, from oil extraction to mining, illegal logging and agriculture. This new Women Defenders initiative is being launched by Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo together with several other Indigenous women leaders that have won major legal victories in their ongoing struggles to defend their traditional territories in the Amazon. The timing of the launch will strategically leverage the platform provided by several prestigious awards in recognition of Nenquimo’s leadership in securing an historic legal victory that shut down Oil Block 22 and protected half-a-million acres of Waorani ancestral rainforest territory.
$5,000 to support the Axenon Ikanwe Radio Program, produced by and for Shipibo-Konibo people both as a strategy for maintaining and strengthening a sense of community that is critical in generating greater levels of activism which have been key for protecting their lands in the Peruvian Amazon from deforestation for the expansion of palm oil plantations and recent oil drilling, as well as to contribute to language and cultural revitalization programs through the nearly exclusive use of the Shipibo-Konibo language during the daily broadcasts (the language is labeled as “Definitely Endangered” by UNESCO due to the emergence of a Spanish-hybrid that is increasingly spoken by people under 50).
$6,500 to support Yurua communities within the 10 million acre Alto Purús Landscape, one of the largest intact ecosystems in the upper Amazon is Southeast Peru, through providing accurate information on potential impacts of a major road construction project, while also working to ensure that the government complies with all relevant laws related to Indigenous input and approval, protected areas, and isolated tribes.
$6,000 to support installing solar and shortwave radio communications systems in 5 Shiwiar communities in their territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon located near the border with Peru, covering an area of over 500,000 acres of intact roadless rainforest that has been defended by Shiwiar from being opened up to oil development. The project was initiated at the request of the communities to help address the Covid crisis currently impacting them and will also support future coordination between communities as they continue to defend their rights and traditional territories.
$100,000 to provide long-term support to Indigenous Peoples mobilizing to save their territories, including in response multiple ongoing threats, including Covid-19, increased fires and, in Brazil, the ongoing threat tied to Brazil’s Bolsonaro government slashing environmental protections, human rights standards, and the rule of law to benefit the very actors destroying the rainforest. CASA provided 69 grants at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to Indigenous and forest communities mobilizing to share information and prevent the spread of Covid-19 on their territories, as well as for food, medicine and other basic needs. Funds also supported the Munduruku Campaign to fight the spread of Covid-19 impacting Munduruku in the Tapajos Basin. RAN has worked with CASA to help distribute funds raised during the 2019 Amazon fires – CASA has an existing and robust network of local advisors across different parts of the Amazon and are able to get funds to Indigenous communities that are underfunded, as well as provide rapid response support to address threats to Indigenous leaders.
