Stronger Indigenous Communities, Stronger Forests.

Our Future, Our Collective Solutions, let's co-create!

My name is Eli Virkina of the Napu-Kichwa Indigenous peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Women within my community and Youth along our home river have been organizing and creating solutions and we need your help! This is my way to help you take action in a way that will truly make a direct impact and help women and youth receive the direct funding they deserve and need. Together we can protect the Amazon Rainforest and strengthen Indigenous Communities.

The Threats: Indigenous Kichwa communities along the Napo River in the Ecuadorian Amazon, like ours, are currently under threat of extinction.

Ongoing pressures from agriculture, deforestation and open pit and legal/illegal mining are fragmenting our ancestral lands and polluting the water sources that we depend on for both spiritual and physical nourishment. While tenuous land purchase agreements - which often move forward without community consent - are forcing Indigenous peoples to live on increasingly small parcels of land, encroachment from nearby cities is also increasing land, culture, and language loss. All of these events combined are disrupting local communities' way of life - which is intrinsically linked to the land that we live on - and causing forest resources to become depleted.

The mining destruction occurring upriver from us is a result of weakened land areas and divided communities which we are trying to combat. Read more. Watch Video

The Solution: Stronger Indigenous Communities, Stronger Forests and Rivers--and a healthier earth for us all!

Without action to protect Kichwa communities and our lands - our way of life, cultures and languages will likely become extinct.

With the support and guidance of our elders, we are using storytelling to lead a movement to address the challenges currently facing our community, through piloting a model for collective land ownership that can ensure the formal protection of ancestral lands, whilst creating new employment opportunities for those living along the Napo river. We recognize that this larger goal is not attainable without Women & Youth whose ideas and creative solutions are key to a thriving future; so this small fund would be used to distribute to projects to strengthen Women (50% of funds) and Youth (50% of Funds). Women in our community are looking to create safe spaces to organize, build capacity, and heal through traditional art while keeping culture alive. Youth are looking to use storytelling to defend our forest home. Funds will be used for capacity building, interviewing elders who are quickly passing, and creating an audiovisual historical record of our home told by Indigenous elders of the region for the first time.

Supporting indigenous, long-term, community based initiatives and projects like these are the real solutions for our collective futures on this earth. Taking care of each other and our home is a shared responsibility. Together we will unite communities and strengthen them while also strengthening the land, forests and rivers that we live in relationship with. Thank you for your support, my community extends their gratitude.