The CLIMA Fund seeks to elevate the insights and solutions of those most impacted by climate change: the women, youth, Indigenous Peoples, and small-scale farmers who tend to be the ones most often overlooked in traditional funding schemes focusing on climate, “development,” or recovery and rebuilding. For years, the four lead partner organizations have funded and partnered with leaders who authentically understand and represent the needs of their communities. Based on these experiences, the CLIMA Fund has chosen to direct its funding towards groups led by women, youth, Indigenous Peoples, and small-scale farmers demanding the opportunity and resources to fully actualize their human rights.
The CLIMA Fund places a special emphasis on women’s leadership, acknowledging the role women play at the nexus of resistance, strategy, leadership, and care of land and water. We believe that without the liberation of women leaders who can exert their power and share wisdom at the grassroots and globally, there can be little substantive, systemic change at any level.
Read about some of our partners from FY23.
Here is a snapshot of our partners’ work in FY22.
Read more stories of grassroots brilliance:
Our partner Taller Comunitario Enchúlame la Bici, a group of bicycle activists, runs a community workshop in the Pensil neighborhood of Mexico City. Community members visit the communal space to learn bike mechanics, repair bikes, or build new ones from scratch using recycled parts. Enchúlame la Bici also influences urban mobility policy through conferences and public advocacy.
Enchúlame la Bici is so much more than a bike shop: they provide a safe space for youth to gather and find employment, support women’s leadership, and advance green transportation policy.
A partner of Global Greengrants Fund, Enchúlame la Bici is ramping up activities as more people rely on bikes during this pandemic, and is spreading public health messages city-wide. During this global crisis, it’s community spaces like these, already embedded in neighborhoods, that are meeting the material and informational needs of communities around the world.
Learn more.
Food sovereignty and food security in Brazil are under threat from the expansion of agribusiness and its promotion of GMOs and agrochemicals. The lack of policies to regulate agribusiness under the authoritarian and right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro, coupled with threats and challenges to peasant organisations due to budget cuts, are compromising community health across the country.
There is no option left but to resist. Movements for agroecology are mounting grassroots resistance against big industrial agriculture across the globe. Our partner Movimento Camponês Popular (MCP)/Popular Peasant Movement in Brazil is resisting by strengthening agroecological seed production and distribution, and implementing agroecological practices to create the foundation for food sovereignty in the region.
In 2021, a jet fuel leak at the Red Hill fuel storage facility, run by the United States military, caused large amounts of petroleum to spill into the main water supply in O’ahu, Hawaii. This leak contaminated water in the area, poisoning the drinking water and critically impacting the health and lives of countless Hawaiian residents. CLIMA Fund member Urgent Action Fund’s grassroots partner organization, O’ahu Water Protectors, is one of several grassroots organizations in Hawaii responding to the Red Hill oil spill.
After the spill at Red Hill, the O’ahu Water Protectors mobilized to take bold action and raise awareness around the disproportionate harm this devastating environmental crisis has had on their community. Their most recent action has gained attention and momentum at the federal level in the United States.
Using a grant from UAF, the O’ahu Water Protectors sent four delegates to Washington, DC, to advocate for clean water in Hawaii and to have Red Hill shut down before it further contaminates the water supply in the area.
In 2007, more than 500 fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples, landless peoples, rural workers, urban movements, migrants, pastoralists, and forest communities from 80 countries convened in Mali at the Forum for Food Sovereignty. The Forum was convened to develop a shared understanding of agroecology as a critical element of food sovereignty. The Forum sought to broaden the food sovereignty movement’s capacity for common action and solidarity. The attendees issued the Nyéléni Declaration on Food Sovereignty, which defines the concept of food sovereignty and grounds it in the diversity of peoples, cultures, and struggles they represent.
The seeds of the concept of food sovereignty were planted by La Vía Campesina during the 1996 World Food Summit to move the conversation beyond ‘food security’. While the latter focuses on guaranteeing sufficient food to all (through trade and market mechanisms), food sovereignty recognizes “food as a fundamental right of all peoples” and identifies it as a guide for achieving economic, social, and political justice. In doing so, it places the producers and consumers of food at the center of the food system, instead of exploitative multinational agriculture companies that are not accountable to local communities.
The declaration defines food sovereignty as the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sustainable methods. It also includes their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.
