Grantmaking
Indigenous Led Funds
Keepers of the Earth Fund
Keepers of the Earth Fund (KOEF) is an Indigenous Led Fund within Cultural Survival that is managed by Indigenous staff and designed to support Indigenous Peoples’ community self-determined development projects. Since 2017, we have supported 392 projects in 40 countries through small grants and a wrap-around approach totaling $2,219,369 directly to Indigenous communities, collectives, organizations, and traditional governments to support projects designed by them and in accordance with their Indigenous values.
KOEF provides small grants of up to $12,000 USD to grassroots Indigenous-led organizations, collectives, and traditional governments in their self-determined development projects based on their Indigenous values. Predicated on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), Cultural Survival uses a rights-based approach in our grantmaking strategies to support grassroots Indigenous solutions through the equitable distribution of resources to Indigenous communities. Some past KOEF projects have focused on the following topics and their intersections: leadership of Indigenous women and youth; political, economic, and food sovereignty; land and water rights; land titling, tenure, and stewardship; agroecology; environmental and biodiversity protection; climate change; carbon sequestration; intergenerational transmission of Traditional Knowledge; Indigenous language and knowledge revitalization; movement-building and Indigenous participation and representation in local, regional, national, and international spaces; COVID-19 response.
Indigenous Community Media Fund
With years of experience coordinating capacity building efforts through workshops, conferences, radio station exchanges, facilitating the development of regional networks, and supporting advocacy efforts to legalize and democratize community media, Cultural Survival elevates the experience, assets, and expertise of the communities that we partner with through our Indigenous Community Media Fund. We believe that it is crucial to listen and respond to the self-determined needs of Indigenous communities in order to provide support that is sustainable and most importantly, pertinent to the needs of the community. Indigenous youth are the future of their communities and developing youth leadership is an integral part of ensuring communities’ well being.
The Indigenous Community Media Fund provides opportunities for Indigenous community radio stations and other media to strengthen their broadcast infrastructure and systems, capacity building to radio teams, advocacy, organizational strengthening, and networks. The Fund enhances community efforts to establish and ensure sustainability of Indigenous community-controlled media. Our grants range from $1,500 to $12,000 for individual projects and projects shared by networks or groups or radio stations.
Since 2017, the Indigenous Community Media Fund has awarded 227 grants to community radios and other community media outlets in 24 countries, totaling over $1,569,348, in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Belize, Colombia, Haiti, México, USA, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, Chile, Kenya, South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, Nigeria, Congo, Nepal, Bangladesh, and India.
