Indigenous community media serves as a platform to amplify the struggles and voices of Indigenous Peoples on local, national, and international stages. These media outlets support resistance, empowerment, and the cultural vitality of Indigenous communities by creating meaningful audiovisual content that reflects their unique interests, languages, and perspectives.
They also encourage meaningful dialogue and learning about individual and collective rights, enabling the active and open participation of women, children, and adults dedicated to preserving their cultural identity, lands, and Traditional Knowledge. By sharing knowledge and integrating new practices, they help ensure that future generations can continue to learn about and connect with their cultural heritage.
Cultural Survival's Indigenous Community Media Fund seeks to provide funding, guidance, and training for a variety of Indigenous community media initiatives that produce news, documentaries, and advocacy content, both within their communities and beyond. Since 2017, the Fund has awarded 330 grants to support community media projects across 29 countries on three continents, totaling $2,327,561.
In 2024, the Fund provided $480,000 in grants to 57 Indigenous communication projects benefiting Indigenous communities in 25 countries across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, the United States, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
The 57 projects financed respond to needs in the areas of infrastructure, equipment, capacity-building, and content production. The funding will contribute to the sustainability of the work and community communication processes led by community groups.
The grants awarded in 2024 were made possible by support from the Ford Foundation, Kellogg, Waverley Street Foundation and Whale Pass Trust, Margaret Cargill, and Climate and Land Use Alliance, to whom we acknowledge their commitment to Indigenous Peoples.
We introduce you to some of our funded partners in 2024 who consented to sharing their projects:
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.
