Amazon Frontlines

Building autonomy and scaling partnerships: amazon frontlines is expanding our partnerships with indigenous communities to achieve a much wider impact in protecting the upper amazon. As we scale our frontline model with new organizations across the region, it's critical that we stay true to our core mission of ensuring that our indigenous partners are leading, learning, and owning the processes that directly respond to their own visions for the well-being of their communities and territories. Our partnership department works together with the leadership and staff of regional indigenous organizations to build their organizational capacity through tailored training in program management, communications and accounting, as well as supporting them in accessing global networks and funding to strengthen their fight to protect their climate-critical territories.through our grantmaking facility we directly provide indigenous leaders and organizations with the resources needed to support a wide array of activities, ranging from convening events and community assemblies crucial for organizational strengthening and community cohesion, to the construction of schools in indigenous communities and the development of communication materials and territorial defense training programs, all of which continued in 2024. We continue making grants for humanitarian aid in response to regional conflicts and environmental crises. For example, we have been able to rapidly regrant emergency funds to indigenous siona communities in response to the ongoing armed conflict in colombia's putumayo province which is currently displacing and threatening the lives of siona communities.

Building community resilience: in efforts to uplift indigenous women as leaders in their communities and develop economic alternatives to fossil fuel extraction, we empower aspiring women entrepreneurs from across the region through our women's leadership and entrepreneurship school, offering workshops on leadership and organizational capacity building for women-led associations, introductions to basic it, computer skills, accounting, finances, e-commerce and digital communications.since 2023, we have supported indigenous nationalities, currently the waorani, kofan and siekopai, to develop and implement their own intercultural education models. These processes involve entire communities and nations, from elders to parents to indigenous authorities, unifying a collective struggle for the cultural survival of their peoples, and the passing down of their ancestral forest knowledge to indigenous youth, who ultimately will be the next generation of leaders fighting on the frontlines of the climate crisis to defend the amazon rainforest.

As we scale our impact across the upper amazon, we are strengthening amazon frontlines' operational capacity by expanding our teams, planning processes, partnerships, and long-term sustainability, as well as helping our indigenous partner organizations to bolster their governance, communications, advocacy, and climate leadership on the regional and global stage. As part of this, we are growing our training and mentorship programs that enable indigenous leaders and youth to document their realities, share ancestral knowledge, and amplify their voices worldwide through innovative media productionbuilding the visibility and influence needed to defend their territories and drive transformative climate action.