Pachamama Alliance
Profile ( less )
P.O. Box 29191
San Francisco
California 94129
United States
Website
Target demographics: Empowering Our Indigenous Partners
The Pachamama Alliance understands that indigenous people are the rainforests' natural custodians and, thus, the key strategies of our alliance focus on empowering them to stand for and represent their own interests as a modern world encroaches on their land and way of living.
One of our initiatives is to support the governance processes of our partners—including the Achuar, Shuar, Shiwiar, Zapara and Kichwa—with tools and strategies to strengthen their areas of decision making and accountability as well as administrative capacity, including accounting, planning and leadership evaluation.
We also work to strengthen the capacity of our partners to advocate for their rights collectively through the formation of networks and alliances. We assist in their efforts by forming advocacy strategies and developing proposals to promote changes in legal and institutional frameworks that encourage respect for human rights and nature.
Awakening the Dreamer Initiative
The invitation from our South American allies was clear: if we really want to help them, we need to go to work in our part of the world.
The Pachamama Alliance's response to the request from the Achuar is the Awakening the Dreamer Initiative, which aims to wake people up from the destructive dream that is currently devouring the planet, and to inspire us to step consciously into a new dream–the pursuit of an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on this Earth.
Right now, the principal focus of our energy in this area is the Awakening the Dreamer: Changing the Dream Symposium, a half-day workshop designed to awaken and inspire people to take action in pursuit of this vision. The aim of the Symposium is to grapple with and reconcile the very assumptions that underlie the way we see the world and our place in it, and with what each of us can do - both individually and cooperatively - to move the world in this new direction.
Rainforest Ecolodge Trips
Each year, The Pachamama Alliance leads more than 150 people on a journey to the Ecuadorian Amazon for a 10-day stay at the Kapawi Ecolodge. These Rainforest Trips give people a direct and intimate encounter with the Achuar—an ancient people in the early stages of their relationship with the modern world. Visitors experience the soul-stirring awe of being in the heart of one of the largest untouched stands of primary rainforests in the world, and they learn what it's like to live in harmony with the Earth directly from the elders and shamans of one of the world's oldest and most intact remaining dream cultures.
Demonstrating the Economic Value of the Rainforests
By supporting the successful transfer of management and ownership of the Kapawi Ecolodge to the Achuar people and by continuing to coordinate ecotourism trips by people from the modern world, The Pachamama Alliance joins our indigenous partners in demonstrating the viability of economic alternatives to oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
- To preserve the Earth’s tropical rainforests by empowering the indigenous people who are its natural custodians, and
- To contribute to the creation of a new global vision of equity and sustainability for all.
• Played a lead role in the successful campaign to include fundamental Rights for Nature in Ecuador’s constitution, for the first time ever in a national constitution. The provisions give nature the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”
• Partnered with other non-governmental organizations and indigenous federations to create and develop widespread support for a Plan Verde (“Green Plan”) for Ecuador. The Plan Verde’s policies and principles help to ensure the preservation of the rain forest and the cultures of the people who call it home.
• Provided direct managerial and financial support for the successful transfer of management and ownership of the Kapawi Ecolodge to the Achuar in 2008, making Kapawi the only high-end ecolodge owned and operated by indigenous people.
• Coordinated the donation of a new airplane to Aerotsentsak, the Achuar’s regional air service used to fly visitors to Kapawi, helping to ensure that roadless areas in the rainforest stay roadless.
• Played a critical role in the formation of two new Amazonian Regional Networks, bringing together indigenous peoples and members of civil society from Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia and Brazil to ensure collective rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon.
• Facilitated the participatory development of the Shuar Federation’s (FIPSE) new constitution and its Integrated Land Use Management Plan, preparing Shuar communities to confront impending outside encroachment on their territory.
• By the end of 2008, the Achuar, Shuar and Shiwiar nationalities gained formal land title to over 2.5 million acres of their ancestral territories with technical and financial assistance from Pachamama.
• More than 150 people experienced a life-changing journey to the Achuar territory in the rainforest through Pachamama’s Travel Program in 2008, connecting with the origins of both the Pachamama Alliance and the Symposium, and forming a long-term partnership with the indigenous people and the forest.
Awakening the Dreamer Initiative
• The Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium reached over 20,000 people by the end of 2008 , representing efforts by volunteer facilitators in more than 25 countries and at least six languages.
• The Symposium experience continues to evolve. Vibrant, new, video-intensive Symposium content represents a new set of tools and improves scalability of the program; a one-day training course for facilitators was developed to support an increasing number of community Symposiums; and a new “Awakening the Dreamer” website and a set of networking and communication tools was launched to strengthen the community of ATD participants and facilitators.
• Two powerful Awakening the Dream Symposiums bookended Power Shift 2009, a historic gathering of youth in Washington, DC in early 2009. A full 10% of the 12,000 participants in the event attended one of the Symposiums, inspiring the extension of the Symposium to youth-organized events across the nation.
• The Symposium concept demonstrated its adaptability in early 2009 when the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights launched a new program for the city of Oakland, California called “Soul of the City,” the core workshop of which adapts the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium.
• Pachamama volunteers presented an organizational overview to the UN Civil Society Task Force, followed by a presentation of the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium to the UN Commission for Social Development.
