GLOBAL GREENGRANTS FUND INC

Global Greengrants supports communities and grassroots leaders that are working to shape their own future from the Bottom Up. Beyond the significant local impacts of the projects that we fund, we see the most important aspect of our grantmaking as building the foundation for an active, powerful grassroots civil society, in which every community is able to participate in decision-making around the laws and customs that affect their world. In this way, we are shifting the balance of power back to local people and communities. The effects are cumulative: by strengthening and legitimating the power of grassroots civil society, local groups inspire others to participate in the future and pave the way for them in decision-making spaces by refining grassroots strategies for engagement and activism.

We believe that every community must have a say in the future of the world if we are to overcome the current environmental crisis. In our 25 years of work, we have witnessed the power of movements based in community efforts to effect lasting environmental and social change. Local communities are the stewards of their land, and they invest unrivaled time, energy, and resources into defending the landscapes that provide for their livelihoods and wellbeing. They possess unique insights and knowledge that can change systems that adversely affect them. For these reasons, when communities come together to address social and environmental injustice, they produce compelling solutions and serve as a root from which larger movements for social change gain the motivation and inspiration to grow.

Support for civil society is particularly necessary at this moment in time. Over the past years, we have seen a trend toward populist governments around the world, making it increasingly difficult for grassroots groups to receive outside funding for their work. In a number of countries, governments have introduced tighter banking restrictions for foreign funds, coupled with tighter restrictions on what groups can do with foreign funding. This is coupled with alarming rates of violence toward environmental and social rights defenders. The goal of these acts and restrictions is to limit civil society space and intimidate local actors into silence. With the closing of civil space, our systems of resilience, our best chance of protecting our shared environment, are slowly eroded.

The creation of an environmental justice movement requires support at many levels with the most basic of them being the communities themselves, which often need a small amount of money to get noticed, voice their concerns, and to propose their own solutions. Smaller amounts of money are very appropriate for this kind of activity. Larger sums of money, on the other hand, can often overwhelm new groups that do not yet have the capacity to effectively absorb it. Funds can support organizing costs, travel, food, meetings, communications, and complements enormous amounts of community time and energy.

Often, well-timed investments have remarkable leverage. For example, in 2007, one of our grantmaking advisors recommended a modest grant to a fledgling Chinese organization, Green Hunan, which was organizing volunteers to monitor Hunan’s intensely polluted rivers. Today Green Hunan has 13 full-time staff, a river-watchers network with more than 400 volunteers, and a robust funding model with 90 percent of their funds coming from domestic sources. Most importantly, Green Hunan has given Hunan’s citizens confidence that they can successfully confront polluting industries and improve the quality of their water. Of Global Greengrants’ role in their success, one of Green Hunan’s co-founders writes:

"It was Global Greengrants who gave us our very first funds. Because of your $500 support, we paid the rent for our office and gradually developed. Truthfully speaking, Greengrants is like the angel investor to us. "

Communities “speak” in other ways, too. For example, small-scale organic farms can provide a visible model of alternative agriculture educating and inspiring other community members to move toward a healthier future. Here, small grants can also make a big difference by providing the seed funding necessary to establish a sustainable livelihood venture. Most importantly, each of these small acts of local decision-making and influence strengthens and legitimizes a communities’ right to shape their own relationship to local resources and the environment.

To support grassroots solutions without imposing an outside agenda, Global Greengrants has developed a decentralized, participatory grantmaking model built on a network of 145 advisors around the world who make funding decisions through consensus-based advisory boards. Our advisors are activists, experts in their fields, and respected environmental justice leaders who have strong ties to local grassroots organizations, a deep understanding of the context in their region, and experience supporting emerging groups and leaders in a variety of ways. Because of their local knowledge and commitment to the issues and actors in their regions and countries, we are able to connect to promising solutions and groups, channel funds to where they are needed most, and to assist our grantees after they have received a grant by providing them with other resources and connections.

Moreover, we know that local struggles can resonate much more if they are connected through broader networks, campaigns, and movements to other communities facing similar struggles and to sympathetic allies in civil society, media, even government. Through these networks, local actions begin to fit with larger narratives and trends that can actually shape how societies and governments think about development. These broader movements also strengthen the work on the ground by giving strength in solidarity and attention to the local communities and by sharing common tactics, tools, and language for promoting change and challenging the status quo. Thus, our decision-making draws heavily on networks for advising and also supports many activities that link local struggles into these movements. Our partnerships with women’s funds located around the world are an example of how we are connecting to other movements and communities most impacted by climate change to strengthen the fight against it.

Since 1993, Global Greengrants has sustained a trusted network of people around the world who are working together to solve the environmental justice challenges that communities face. Over these 25 years, we have learned much from the persistence and resourcefulness of our grantees as they have defended their resources, rights, and livelihoods and have built the groundwork for a sustainable future. We know that true change comes slowly and often requires many years of diligent effort and resilience. In light of this reality, we are all the more pleased to report that many of our grantees, with the help of your generous support, have achieved remarkable wins over the past year, including:

• The dunes and wetlands of Putú in Chile, home to over 120 species of birds, were officially designated as a protected nature sanctuary by Chile’s Ministry of the Environment in October 2017 thanks to the advocacy and outreach of grantees opposing iron mining in the area.

• Our grantee, COMUNDICH (Coordination of Associations and Communities for the Integral Development of the Cho’rti People), has been awarded the Guatemala Human Rights Commission’s Alice Zachmann prize for its highly successful work to regain customary lands illegally taken from the Cho’rti people. COMUNDICH’s win is not only a victory for human rights, it is a victory for the environment. When forests remain in the hands of Indigenous stewards, they are far more likely to be managed sustainably, helping to offset climate change by absorbing and trapping greenhouse gases.

• Indigenous grantees in Canada celebrated their third court win against a proposed open-pit goldmine on the banks of their sacred lake. Their victory in court was fueled in part by an emotional documentary, funded by Global Greengrants, which helped to humanize the potential impacts the loss of the lake would have on the local peoples.