How you can directly support Indigenous frontline communities

By Tzeporah Berman, International Programs Director, Stand.earth

I’ll be blunt: the environmental movement doesn’t give enough credit, recognition, or support to Indigenous frontline communities. Meanwhile, many Indigenous leaders are quite literally risking their lives on a daily basis to push back against the fossil fuel industry’s invasion and destruction of their ancestral homelands.

We want to change that. That’s why Stand.earth and our allies created the Frontline Fund to directly support Indigenous and other frontline activists around the world who are standing up to the oil and gas industry.

Until recently, this fund has been mainly supported by a few extremely generous individuals and grants from foundations. However, with an influx of requests in 2020, we’re now reaching out to our grassroots community to see if they can help take the Frontline Fund to the next level.

If you can, will you give a gift in order to directly support frontline and Indigenous communities and leaders?

Many of the communities and leaders we are working with simply don’t have the time or capacity to develop fundraising efforts on their own. They just need support quickly for critical, time sensitive fights.

Our team does the fundraising and administrative legwork so that frontline groups can focus on what’s important: on-the-ground efforts to protect land and water and make positive societal changes. The money we raise goes directly to supporting frontline activism.

With your help, we’re going to scale this program up to make sure brave land protectors everywhere have the resources they need to assert sovereignty over their lands and continue to resist toxic oil and gas development.

Can you pitch in whatever you’re able (seriously, even just $5 would make a huge difference) so more frontline land and water protectors can get the support they need?

Since its creation in 2017, the Frontline Fund has provided crucial support to Indigenous communities from the Arctic to the Amazon.

When the Wet’suwet’en called for help in opposing the Coastal GasLink pipeline, the Frontline Fund spent tens of thousands of dollars, covering the cost of multiple vehicles, communication equipment, travel, and food so they could better protect their homes.

When the Tiny House Warriors of the Secwepemc Nation needed to get the message out about their fight to stop the Trans Mountain Pipeline, the Frontline Fund donated a MiFi unit and covered the cost for two years of a camp security cell phone bill.
When the Kichwa Nation’s only plane broke down – forcing them to travel 11 days by foot between communities to share information about oil and gas expansion threats near their home in the Ecuadorian Amazon – the Frontline Fund paid to repair the plane.

This is only a small sample of the kind of work the Frontline Fund does to support Indigenous warriors – and an even smaller cross section of the kind of work that needs to be done to support Indigenous and other frontline activists around the globe.

The unfortunate truth is that there are more urgent requests coming into the Frontline Fund than we can respond to.

Help change that: donate $5 or whatever you’re able to help power frontline resistance to oil and gas expansion. Every single dollar you donate will go directly toward supporting frontline communities.

Together, the Stand.earth community can lift up and resource the crucial work that Indigenous and other frontline activists are doing around the world, from the west coast of Turtle Island to the Amazon rainforest.

Our team is fewer than 50 people, but this community is more than 430,000 people strong and growing – and together, we’re using our collective power to fight climate change, protect wild spaces, stand with impacted communities, and say no to new fossil fuels.

Let’s create a reality where Indigenous and other frontline communities have all the support they need to stand toe-to-toe with the governments and corporations that would pollute and destroy their homes.