RAN’s 2024 Community Action Grants Supported Key Alliances Fighting for Climate Justice – The Understory

Although 2024 brought significant challenges for the climate movement worldwide—ranging from the rise of the global far right to devastating forest fires from California to Patagonia and rising global temperatures—Indigenous and frontline communities remained resilient and unwavering, continuing to lead the movement for climate justice. A key pillar of RAN’s work over the past forty years has been supporting those at the frontline of the environmental and human rights movement and creating broad coalitions of resistance to corporate power and environmental destruction through our Community Action Grants Program, designed to channel funds quickly and efficiently to Indigenous and local communities who may otherwise not have access to more traditional forms of funding.

2024 was no different. Last year, RAN distributed over $850,000 in Community Action Grants (CAG), with over 80 grants in 15 countries across five continents. CAG grants supported land rights strategies in Asia, BIPOC communities in the U.S. Gulf South, Amazonian and coastal communities in Peru, Afro-descendent and Indigenous communities in Colombia, and broad alliances in Brazil. 2024 showed that the struggles that unite communities can overcome the barriers put in place by those in power to divide them, a theme that will continue to inform our strategy in 2025.

The #NoFerrogrão Alliance in Brazil is a prime example of how RAN’s Community Action Grants unite communities around a common goal: protecting our environment. The Alliance, which brings together various organizations, including the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples (APIB), the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), the Munduruku Pariri Association, and the Kayapo Kabu Institute, seeks to stop the construction of the EF-170 railway project, also known as the Ferrogrão. The project, which would connect to Cargill’s Abaetetuba port, would cut 600 miles through the Amazon and lead to 1,200 square miles of deforestation in 16 Indigenous territories, causing insurmountable damage to the rainforest and Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods and traditions in the area.

In March 2024, with funding from RAN’s Community Action Grants program, the Alliance was able to organize a week-long tour of the communities impacted by the project, conducting workshops on the adverse effects of the project on the community. The tour also included a strategic planning assembly, where 80 members of the organizations came up with ideas for coalition building, advocacy, and strategy to put political pressure on those behind the railway.

On the other side of the Amazon in Peru, RAN’s Community Action Grants program, in collaboration with the Global Greengrants Fund, supported the MarAmazonia Alliance. MarAmazonia brings together fishing communities from the Northern Coast impacted by offshore oil drilling with three Indigenous nations from the Amazon, the Wampís, Achuar, and the Chapra nations, whose lands are affected by oil exploration. In 2024, with the support of RAN’s CAG program, the Alliance was able to take part in a delegation pressuring banks to end new funding for PetroPerú, the Peruvian state oil company, create community-based economic initiatives, and critical gatherings on Human Rights and a Just Energy Transition. Due to MarAmazonia’s delegation and a report released in collaboration with Amazon Watch, PetroPerú’s expansion was stopped, the company was downgraded by three credit agencies, a one billion dollar bond was held up, and the company’s board resigned in September, showing how critical Community Action Grants can be for frontline organizations advancing their strategies.

RAN also supported the Vessel Project in organizing a similar delegation, bringing BIPOC activists to New York in the summer of 2024. The organization, a BIPOC-led grassroots mutual aid, disaster relief, and environmental justice organization, organizes in communities affected by methane and petrochemical industries in Southwest Louisiana. Vessel Project brought activists to New York to pressure banks on their turf, organizing multiple protests in what they dubbed the Summer of Heat, a play on words that evoked the consequences of the banks’ actions. The action was an excellent way to build a multiracial, multigenerational, cross-class movement of sustained action demanding that Wall Street stop investing in, financing, and insuring fossil fuels while showing the banks that they can’t continue to be unaccountable to the consequences of the projects that they finance. CAG grants also ensured that momentum from the Summer of the Heat continued into Climate Week by supporting the travel costs of The Vessel Project’s Director, Roishetta Sibley Ozane, to attend Climate Week and participate in an event on finance and the Paris Agreement that RAN and Parliamentarians for a Fossil Free Future co-hosted.

RAN’s Community Action Grants program also served as a lifeline to activists attending the COP16 Conference on Biodiversity in Cali, Colombia. One of the organizations RAN supported was CENPAZ, an umbrella organization of Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and Peasant organizations. In anticipation of the COP in October, CENPAZ organized a gathering to honor Phanor Guazaquillo Peña, an Indigenous land defender murdered in December 2023, and create a magazine that highlights the connection between peace and biodiversity in Colombia that was circulated among attendees at the COP. The magazine informed conference attendees about the unique challenges that Afro-Colombian and Indigenous peoples face in Colombia when protecting the environment and their territories. RAN’s CAG program also supported a delegation of activists from Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities throughout Colombia to attend COP16, providing critical opportunities for learning and networking with activists worldwide.

In 2024, RAN continued its ongoing solidarity with the Ceibo Alliance through our CAGs. Ceibo Alliance is an organization that brings together the Siona, A’i Kofan, Siekopai, and Waorani Indigenous nations in the Ecuadorian Amazon to work together to defend their territory and cultural autonomy while building solutions-based alternatives to rainforest destruction. RAN’s grants provided the Alliance with the resources to expand their territorial defense strategies through community-based monitoring, mapping, and governance efforts, protecting nearly 960,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest in addition to support for conferences and leadership development opportunities for the Alliance’s members. RAN also provided much-needed support for the Alliance’s political advocacy, securing a historic legal victory that lays the groundwork to give Indigenous land titles to 3.5 million hectares of Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. Additionally, CAG contributed to expanding community-led education models that balance Western technical subjects with the reintegration of Indigenous language, worldview, and ways of learning. The work of the Alliance shows that despite the attempts of the Ecuadorian government and elites to nullify the historic achievements of the country’s Indigenous movements by continuing to extract the Amazon, there is strength in a united alliance to protect the Amazon.

Despite the many threats that 2024 posed to democracy and the environment, RAN’s Community Action Grants program shows that significant victories can be achieved through broad alliances in the Global South and the periphery of the Global North. From the Brazilian Amazon to the Gulf South, community organizations are showing that they can unite those most affected by climate chaos, challenge corporate power, and resist the tide of climate change. As we enter into uncertain times in 2025, RAN’s Community Action Grants will be a key tool for grassroots organizations around the world to build strong alliances that can stand up to the rise of the far-right and those who seek to use the global crisis to profit off of the destruction of our environment and further our descent into climate chaos. CAG reminds us that those who are most affected by climate change will be the ones who lead the struggle to stop it.