Indigenous Community Media Fund

The Indigenous Community Media Fund (formerly the Community Media Grants Project) provides opportunities for international Indigenous community radio stations to strengthen their broadcast infrastructure and systems while providing training opportunities to their community journalists through a participatory and dynamic grants program. The initiative enhances community efforts to establish and ensure sustainability of Indigenous community-controlled media. This Fund launched with support from the Novo Foundation Fund of the Tides Foundation.

“Indigenous Peoples’ right to freedom of expression and information is the overarching goal of this initiative. The program’s intent is to ensure target Indigenous communities have a viable and community controlled medium for dissemination of local and world news, information, community events, politics, and education. Community Radio provides access to information in extremely rural areas and for these communities serves as a tool for local organizing, cultural and language revitalization, educational opportunities, information on lands and natural resources issues, women’s rights, and Indigenous rights,” said Galina Angarova, Executive Director of Cultural Survival.

During the first phase of this initiative, some grants were awarded in partnership with WACC. With its vision of communication rights for all, WACC’s goal is to improve access to public communication and relevant information for poor, marginalized, excluded and dispossessed people in order to enhance their participation in shaping local and national priorities and actions.

In 2016, Cultural Survival and WACC selected first year grant partners from our network of international Indigenous radio stations. First year grantees were selected from four major regions, Central America, East Africa, South America and Nepal. Projects are selected and mentored through a program design process based on the needs of their communities, best practices in the field, community values and capacities. Grantees are selected with the criteria of immediate need, promise for continued success, and the ability to participate fully in the initiative.

Cultural Survival has been working with the Indigenous radio movement since 2005. Today, Indigenous-controlled media is needed more than ever, especially when mainstream media often overlooks and marginalizes Indigenous languages and issues. Daily, Indigenous radio journalists risk their lives to communicate essential information about human rights to their communities to defend their ways of life, lands, and resources. As an advocacy organization for Indigenous rights, it is our duty to support these efforts in claiming freedom of expression and access to information. It is our hope that over the coming years, many communities will benefit from this initiative,” said Mark Camp, Cultural Survival Deputy Executive Director.