Leading alliance actions among Local Funds in the South – South context

Casa Fund has been intensely dedicated in recent years to two lines of action within the field of international philanthropy: (1) developing a strong narrative that highlights the difference between local funds formed by activists from the Global South and the categories known and consolidated during the long history of philanthropy from the North; and (2) document and share its differentiated model, also already consolidated by its history of supporting socio-environmental movements in South America. During this process of supporting the entire region, it became very clear to us that the closer and more accessible a fund is to the public eye, the better equipped it is to work to protect our important biomes and the more efficient this fund becomes to finance more and more vulnerable and excluded local communities. It also became clear that, just as northern funds operating in our regions have limited reach to this essential audience, so does a single regional fund.

Therefore, it made much more sense that we were several local funds, rather than a large regional one, no matter how big we could become – because our mission was never to centralize a good idea to grow indefinitely, it was always to find ways for the resources to arrive in expressive volume, and in a careful, fast and efficient way, to the guardians of our biomes.

With this in mind, we decided to organize all our grantmaking methodology, our philosophical and scientific base, our management experience and relationships in the field of philanthropy; document all of this, and offer it to our socio-environmental activist allies in countries neighboring Brazil – those who had been our advisor in our direct support, so that they might have the chance to mobilize and allocate resources to the major issues in their countries as well. We also envisioned that several funds acting in a coordinated and complementary manner in the same cross-border biomes would have many more possibilities to move successful protection processes forward.

From there, we began to consult our partners and, to our delight, activists from 6 countries were interested in talking more about the topic. Of these countries, four have already quickly structured their local funds – in addition to an African country that, coincidentally, was looking for models to create a local socio-environmental fund. We saw, therefore, that our model is replicable in any context and in any country. As Casa Fund already had very close relationships with 3 other similar older funds, we decided among the 9 funds that it was time to create an alliance, and Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur — the Socio-Environmental Funds of the Global South was born.

The logo of Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur is inspired by a vision from the South of the Earth.

This alliance, therefore, is made up of local organizations, founded by local actors with experience in socio-environmental issues in their countries, who have created mechanisms for distributing financial resources and capacity-building tools, sharing the same mission and vision with those who have the knowledge to protect our biomes and the populations that have always lived in them. These funds together cover more than 27 countries, and today spread across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

They aim to directly support local communities, protectors of the great planetary biomes, primarily responsible for the Earth’s climate balance and biodiversity. They play a key role in funding projects and initiatives that promote sustainable development, protect the environment, strengthen local communities, as well as combat inequality and environmental racism. Currently, this alliance has representatives in Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Central America, Mexico, Southeast Asia and Mozambique.
 

Distribution of Alianza member funds.

Local funds together are also better able to access resources, consolidate new narratives, and raise awareness in the field of philanthropy, as our joint position in the world strengthens our mission and highlights our collective ability to offer unique solutions. We have more tools to produce knowledge and provoke discussions on how philanthropy can contribute to social and environmental transformation in countries of the Global South based on the consistency of its actors, building safe paths for resources to reach communities.

In the context of climate change, local funds from the Global South are essential for financing projects and initiatives that promote the adaptation and mitigation of these changes. These funds allow local communities to implement sustainable practices and technologies, many of which have already proven to be innovative, within the fields of forest management, low-carbon agriculture, sustainable management of water resources, promotion of renewable energies, and many others. These initiatives not only contribute to protecting the environment, but also to improving the living conditions of local communities, reverberating the planetary solutions that we all seek.

Founded December 9, 2021 during a live video, that to our pleasant surprise, attracted more than 100 funders, we were able to tell the world why we were coming together. Since then, interest in this initiative has grown and, in addition to being asked to participate in several case studies of many global philanthropy initiatives, we had our first collective grant committed, now in progress, of 8 million dollars. The support comes from the new Forest Peoples and Climate program, administered by CLUA – Climate and Land Use Alliance. This support enables us to achieve an important institutional consolidation of the Alianza itself, which includes global coordination, a joint governance and management structure of resources that are being shared equally for each of the 9 funds. In addition to resources for consolidating new funds and advancing older ones, approximately 60% of the total amount will be donated directly to around 800 forest community groups across the planet.

Maria Amália Souza, Founder and Director of Strategic Development at Casa Fund at the live launch of Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur on December 9, 2021.

Casa Fund is immensely happy to have inspired this whole movement and to be part of something much bigger than us – a legacy not only for the work of protecting the planet, but certainly for the field of philanthropy. Over the past 8 years of building and sharing these tools, global discussions and the systematization that would make it possible for our model to be used and adapted to the local realities of so many countries, we have still managed to find some non-believers. One theory was that, by creating more funds, we would be “sharing the same pie”, only decreasing the value for each country. Or that, as we started to concentrate more in Brazil, strengthening local funds in the region would decrease our own resources… but none of that happened, quite the opposite.

We were sure that Casa Fund, no matter how big it was, could never meet all the demand from all the biomes in a region as immense as South America. And, from our own experience, we knew that it was not possible to capture all the resources available for this region. Those were things that independent local funds could certainly do themselves, providing a more legitimate and authentic funding disbursement structure within their own cultures, legislation, language and, most importantly, local currency.  This is the only way to reach these groups that have been our focus, those who have no idea that the “field of philanthropy” exists, much less go looking for funding or public calls for proposals to apply to.

In these few years of existence, two or three, each fund has been able to access resources that are exclusively directed to their countries, their causes, and which have grown exponentially since their creation. This has been possible precisely because they were born counting on experienced and consolidated systems that we were able to offer them, exchanges that we constantly carry out, and, obviously, with their own deep knowledge of the environmental causes within their countries.

Meeting with Alianza members held in Colombia in April 2023. Photo: Fondo Emerger Archive.

Casa Fund, in turn, more than tripled its own access to funds during this period, almost entirely for Brazil, providing around 500 grants per year to all our biomes and their guardians. In addition, we have been able to work jointly among the 5 South American funds in our cross-border regions, complementing important support strategies for the advancement of the peoples that share these territories.

Now, in addition to South America, we will be able to share expressive results with socio-environmental funds all over the planet, and that is priceless. Of course, our objective within Casa Fund, and the Socio-Environmental Funds of the Global South, is to continue supporting new initiatives by activists from the Global South who seek to create their own funds.

As an Alliance, having our own shared resources allows us to demonstrate to the international field, that there is indeed, in the Global South, structures capable of landing – or localizing, as they like to call it – expressive levels of funding for forest peoples and so many other relevant actors in our own countries, for our own causes and for our own problems, which only we can solve.

We hope that this is the awakening of a new time for the global movement that protects Life, and for its true guardians.

P.S: In September 2023, the Environmental Justice Fund, from South Africa, joined the Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur.

This text was originally published in the 2022 Annual Report of the Casa Socio-Environmental Fund. Click here to access.

Want to know more about Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur? Contact info@alianzafondosdelsur.org