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Our Voices, Our Environment • March 2018

Why Grassroots Organizations Benefit From Approaching Environmental Justice With a Gender Perspective—and Why Funders Should Support these Collaborations

Silvia Perez Yescas of Oaxaca, Mexico, knows what it’s like to have her voice silenced. For an entire year, month after month, she stood outside a room full of men who gathered to discuss land rights and environmental issues that were affecting family and community well-being. For an entire year, she planted herself firmly on the other side of the room’s window—she wasn’t “allowed” to come inside—and raised her hand to participate in the discussion. For an entire year, the men ignored her. Why? Because Yescas is a woman.

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Global Greengrants Fund • February 2019

Women Fight Impacts of Climate Change with Vital Mangroves

In Pari village, eleven species of mangroves have been reduced to just five. The consequences of this decimation are dire not only for the health of the local economy and survival of coastal villages as fish disappear from the ravaged mangrove areas, but also for the bigger picture.

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Great Outdoors Colorado • October 2018

Conserving the Cline: A community effort to protect a historic ranch

On the horizon, barely visible through the falling snow, you can see them: elk, by the hundreds, silhouetted against the shadowy mountains beyond. Rolling meadows stretch in every direction, and Tarryall Creek, framed by the muted deep-gold of late-fall willows and shrubs, snakes its way through the land. Just off a rutted dirt road, an adobe-style pueblo-revival ranch house, built in 1928, stands hollowly, yet proudly over the landscape it anchors—a reminder of a bygone era, and a beacon of potential.

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Our Voices, Our Environment • March 2018

Resisting Exploitative Extractive Industries in the Peruvian Amazon through Sustainable Agriculture

Under pressure from extractive industries like logging, mining, and palm-oil harvesting, the indigenous way of life in the Peruvian Amazon hangs in the balance. Families are struggling to sustain livelihoods based on land that is being depleted. Children are fleeing their homes for work in the city, leaving their heritage and culture behind. And natural resources critical to survival are disappearing into the void of foreign corporations with an eye on exports and profits. The biggest burden-bearers? Women—the caretakers of land, harvesters of food, and collectors of water.

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Global Greengrants Fund • February 2016

The Green Heart of Central Africa

If you’re like billions of people on the planet, you get up in the morning, go to work to provide for your family, and come home at night with something for dinner. Your picture might be framed a little differently, but the details boil down to the same thing: livelihood. A means of support or subsistence. Now imagine your livelihood just…ends. Imagine that someone with more power and more money than you yanks away your occupation, your property, your food sources, and your access to medicine without asking what you think. Your entire means of survival vanishes. For the indigenous people of central Africa, this scenario isn’t hypothetical.

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Global Greengrants Fund • February 2016

South Sudanese Women Find Salvation in Stoves

It sounds like a brutally disturbing nightmare: Alone in a forest miles from home, a teenage girl fights off a man as he tries to rape her. She flees home in terror, hours on foot, afraid for her life. The next day, the scene repeats itself as she is forced to collect firewood again. Facing her attacker in the forest again, as she must day after day. For Susan Ozene and countless women outside the city of Yei in battle-scarred South Sudan, this nightmare is more than a bad dream. It is reality.

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Global Greengrants Fund • January 2016

It’s Not Too Late: Protecting Papua New Guinea’s Oceans

“The sea was once filled with fish,” the elderly man told a gathering of indigenous community leaders from across Papua New Guinea’s Oro Bay. He was a grandfather from a local village where people depend on the ocean for their food. In his day, it had been easy.