World Centric: Rainforest Action Network

World Centric + Rainforest Action Network

$40,000.00 from profits from fiscal year 2020

Rainforest Action Network preserves forests, protects the climate and upholds human rights by challenging corporate power and systemic injustice through frontline partnerships and strategic campaigns.

World Centric has been supporting RAN since 2010, the second year of our giving program. They are a rare exception to our program in that our grant goes into their Community Action Grants fund, supporting a wide range of projects that they select. RAN then reports back to us on the projects they were able to fund with our donation.

Indigenous and frontline communities are the best stewards of the world’s rainforests and the best organizers against climate change. History has proven that time and again — and that is why RAN created the Community Action Grants program. This program provides crucial and rapid funding for people fighting in their own communities across the globe to protect millions of acres of forest, to keep millions of tons of carbon in the ground, and to protect the rights and self determination of local communities. We fund 2 types of Community Action Grants:

Protect An Acre

Protect An Acre grants support grassroots leadership and local organizations in forest regions to protect threatened forest lands (logging, mining, etc) and to protect the human rights of communities that have co-existed with and depended on these regions for generations. These grants are critical to help local activists regain control of sustainably managed traditional territories.

Climate Action Fund

The Climate Action Fund (CAF) supports frontline communities directly challenging the fossil fuel industry. CAF provides small grants (generally $2,500 or less) to local groups tackling the root causes of climate change — the extraction and combustion of dirty fossil fuels such as coal and oil

An example of a community action that we supported is Giniw Collective:

Giniw Collective is a grassroots, frontlines effort that is Indigenous women-led to protect Anishinaabe territory from the destruction of Enbridge's Line 3 tar sands project. Giniw Collective leads bold, nonviolent direct actions, along with initiatives like the Indigenous Media Makers #Stop Line 3 project. RAN provided $5,000 from World Centric to help Giniwi Collective engage in media and storytelling work regarding their urgent efforts resisting the Line 3 pipeline.Funds were used to purchase, transport, and distribute fully prepped media gear kits, as well as to provide software access and training to several different Indigenous frontline organizations. Line 3 would cross more than 200 bodies of water, including lakes, wetlands, and rivers, endangering freshwater resources and the pristine lake country of northern Minnesota where Native Americans harvest wild rice and hold treaty rights. The Line 3 pipeline would also significantly increase climate emissions, adding the equivalent of 50 new coal-fired power plants or 38 million cars. Because of indigenous resistance from groups including the Giniw, it is beginning to seem increasingly likely that plans for any future tar sands pipelines in North America will not move forward due to the years delays that have been caused to all current pipeline projects.