Helping to give Indigenous communities a voice

Project snapshot

What

Donation to overseas charity

Why

To empower indigenous communities of the Amazon rainforest

How

Charitable Trust

Our support

Our client, who holds a Charitable Trust, recognises that utilising the knowledge of indigenous people is critical if we are to address climate change and reverse declines in biodiversity. However, these communities often don’t have a voice at a global or even regional level.

To address this the client contacted us to request a sizeable donation (in dollars) to the Pachamama Alliance, a charity based in San Francisco but its work is centered in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon. 

We were more than happy to support this generous donation and helped the client to move funds held in an offshore bank account into their Charitable Trust for this purpose.   

Our private client and verification teams also helped to make sure the donation stayed compliant with UK (HMRC), US and Canadian rules on foreign donations. To do this, the teams worked closely with the Pachamama Alliance to understand how the funds would be used. For our client, this reduced the reputational risk and the administration involved in giving overseas and made sure that it delivered the impact they wanted.

The impact

The Pachamama Alliance works in partnership with the Indigenous people of the Sacred Headwaters (a region within the Amazon rainforest). Our client’s donation was restricted towards one of these partnerships, the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance  (ASHA). ASHA is an Alliance of 30 Indigenous nations in Ecuador and Peru. Their shared vision is to permanently protect 86 million acres of bio-culturally diverse tropical rainforests (an area larger than Italy) in the headwaters of the mighty Amazon River, in the Napo, Pastaza, and Marañon River Basins.  

Consequently, the funds donated by our client will be used by the ASHA and strengthen their innovative approach to indigenous-led forest protection.  

“The funds will be used to strengthen the Alliance through the implementation of the Bioregional Plan 2030 while continuing to grow local and global partnerships.

Receiving these funds means the alliance can directly support emergencies in the Indigenous territories of the Sacred Headwaters Bioregion in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon.

These funds will also allow us to continue to build pilot projects in the Indigenous territories to empower the local communities and their governance. These projects include a leadership school for Indigenous youth, various bioeconomy projects, women empowerment workshops and public health initiatives.”

Rafaela Iturralde, Global Partnerships Coordinator of ASHA

Photographed by Atossa Soltani