The Pachamama Alliance
The mission is to empower indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest to preserve their lands and culture and, using insights gained from that work, to educate and inspire individuals everywhere to bring forth a thriving, just and sustainable world.
The Story
The Pachamama Alliance was born in response to a request from the Achuar, an indigenous people deep in the Amazon region of Ecuador. The Achuar made the courageous decision to seek a partnership with people from the industrialized world who would work with them in protecting their rainforest home and their traditional way of life. Out of this unique partnership, it has become evident that indigenous wisdom and insight offer enormous value in addressing the complex issues that we face in our modern world.
Work in South America
The Pachamama Alliance, in partnership with FundaciónPachamama, empowers indigenous people of the western Amazon basin to defend their territories and cultures. They partner with groups whose territories span the border regions of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia. This extends over tens of millions of acres of one of the most pristine and biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, a source of biological and medicinal wealth for all humanity, and home to people still deeply connected to their traditional ways of life.
Legal and Collective Rights
Pachamama is an indigenous Kichwa word meaning Mother Earth – or more completely the Earth, the sky, the universe, and all time.
They provide legal services and make available training and consulting on indigenous peoples’ collective and legal rights under local, national and international law.
Capacity Building and Organization
They provide training in planning, accounting, management and budgeting for the leaders of the various indigenous federations.
Economic Alternatives
They actively research and implement sustainable economic alternatives to the main threats to their lands—oil drilling, mining and logging. Ecotourism and improved agriculture and aquaculture practices are the primary alternatives we are working with now.
Mapping and Land Titling
They provide training in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) so that our indigenous partners can map their territories and secure communal title to their lands.
Jungle Mamas
They empower indigenous women and their communities through training to ensure safe birthing practices and improved maternal, newborn and community health.
New Economic Models
They are working to create alternative, complementary currency systems, to support rural development and promote local production, consumption and trade.
Rights of Nature
They are building a global alliance of experts from around the world to bring forth the universal adoption and implementation of Rights of Nature, a legal concept we successfully championed for inclusion in Ecuador’s new Constitution in 2008—making Ecuador the first country in history to do so.
Pachamama Rainforest Journeys
The Pachamama Alliance offers life-changing travel opportunities to visit with, and learn from, indigenous people in the Amazon Rainforest and the Andes of Ecuador.
Work Around the World
Awakening the Dreamer Initiative
The purpose of the Symposium: Bringing forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet.
www.awakeningthedreamer.org
From the beginning of our partnership, the indigenous people urged us to focus on ‘changing the dream of the modern world’, since it is our ‘dream’ – over-consumption without regard for social and environmental consequences — that is driving the destruction of the rainforests around the world. Out of our work with these ancient cultures, we have come to understand that we in the so called ‘modern’ world truly are in a kind of trance, living a dream that is threatening not just the rainforests, but the health and wellbeing of the entire planet.
In response their request, we launched the Awakening the Dreamer Initiative — the key component of which is a transformational educational program called the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium.
The Symposium’s goal is to wake participants up from the trance we are living in, to identify the unexamined assumptions that create and maintain the trance, and begin to appreciate the extraordinary possibilities emerging at this time in history. Through participation in this program, people are encouraged to find their unique and powerful role as agents of change in creating a new future.
Since its launch in San Francisco in March 2005, the Symposium has spread rapidly, reaching hundreds of thousands of people in 50 countries on six continents. It is now being delivered by nearly 3000 trained volunteers in at least nine languages. This world-wide community of agents of change is arising as a powerful force for changing the dream of the modern world.
