Grants in South America

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Caura Futures

$3,500 to support Caura Futures conservation efforts within the 45,300 km² Caura River Basin in the Venezuelan Amazon through providing training and tools to safeguard Indigenous knowledge, improve human health, and promote good ecosystem stewardship, including addressing the issue that some youths today are more likely to fell, rather than climb, a palm tree for its fruit by creating new enthusiasm for the traditional practice of tree-climbing through introducing new gear, reviewed and approved by community members, and holding competitions (a workshop also expanded this aspect of the project to Iquitos, Peru, where wild palm fruit markets are highly developed and the problem of felling palms is widespread).

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Organizacion Shuar de Morona (OSHDEM)

$3,000 to support an inter-ethnic congress of Shuar, Achuar, Wambisa, Shapra, Kandoshi and Kichwa peoples in the Morona river basin in the northern Peruvian Amazon in order to discuss the common threats to their territory, watershed, rivers and lakes posed by pending oil drilling by Talisman Energy in Block 64 with the objective of forming a common position to defend ancestral Indigenous territory and keep oil companies out. Talisman Energy was forced to abandon oil drilling plans in the Peruvian Amazon the following year.

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FundaciĚ_n Runa

$3,000 to support the creation of a 200 acre mixed-use agroforestry project, incorporating cacao, coffee, and guayusa to provide income for communities, while also serving as a strategic buffer zone around the Colonso Protected Area, 25,000 acres of natural forest in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

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Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana (AIDESEP)

$2,500 to support a major gathering on the anniversary of an Indigenous-led strike throughout the Peruvian Amazon against oil development with the goal of strengthening the resolve of regional based organizations and communities to defend their collective territories through increased knowledge of available legal tools and precedents, including ILO Convention No. 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

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Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre (MXVPS)

$5,000 to provide emergency funding to support a unified grassroots response to the Brazilian government’s plans to move forward with construction of the Belo Monte dam complex, which would devastate more than 1,500 square kilometers in the Amazon and result in the forced displacement of 20,000 people.

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Shinai

$5,000 to help the organization deepen their critical work supporting Achuar, Quichua and Urarinas communities in the Corrientes and Pastaza river basins in the northern Peru Amazon, a region impacted by 4 decades of oil development, through a program to monitor a collective 3 million acres of traditional territories, as well as organizational capacity building and cultural revitalization programs.

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Mobilization of Indigenous People of the Cerrado (MOPIC)

$5,000 to support the production of a documentary focusing on Bunge and Cargill’s operations in the heart of the Brazilian Cerrado in Mato Grosso to raise awareness and be used as an organizing tool to engage and empower communities on the frontlines of soy expansion, some of whom have fields coming right up to the border of their titled land.

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Associação Indígena Kïsêdjê

$4,000 to support a gathering of members of the four Kisedje communities to organize and education all Kisedje people about agribusiness, its threats, and the Indigenous movement in the Brazilian Cerrado currently challenging the expansion of soy production.

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Traditional U’wa Authority

$2,500 to support a grassroots mobilization of U’wa community members in defense of their territory in the cloud forests of northeastern Colombia against imminent gas extraction activities, also facilitating a delegation of civil society allies, civilian government officials, and international media.