#indigenous

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Amazon Frontlines

A frontline legal and advocacy organization helping Amazonian indigenous nations win court-ordered title to their ancestral territories.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Live & Learn Fiji

From mangrove replanting to cyclone-ready water systems, rural Fijian villages are building their own climate defences with Indigenous knowledge at the core.

🇦🇺 Australia · Clontarf Foundation

Clontarf uses AFL and rugby league academies embedded in schools to keep young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men engaged in education and headed toward jobs.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Green Empowerment

A Portland-based nonprofit partners with grassroots engineers to build community-owned micro-hydro systems that bring reliable, affordable electricity to Indigenous villages in the Philippine highlands.

🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau · Tiniguena (Esta Terra É Nossa)

Guinea-Bissau's oldest conservation NGO helped Bijagós islanders create West Africa's first community-run marine protected area and still co-manages it with them.

🇳🇨 New Caledonia · Association pour la Conservation en Cogestion du Mont Panié (Dayu Biik)

Seven Kanak tribes co-manage New Caledonia's highest peak, protecting a critically endangered ancient pine found nowhere else on Earth.

🇦🇺 Australia · Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation

Yolŋu Traditional Owners founded Dhimurru to manage Australia's first jointly declared land and sea Indigenous Protected Area across northeast Arnhem Land.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · EcoNusa Foundation

EcoNusa helps Indigenous Papuan and Maluku communities map, defend, and sustainably manage their own forests and mangroves against palm oil and logging expansion.

🇦🇺 Australia · Erub Arts

On a tiny Torres Strait island, Indigenous artists weave thousands of abandoned fishing nets into internationally exhibited sculptures that fight ocean plastic and keep sea culture alive.

🇼🇫 Wallis and Futuna · Faiva Tautai

A handful of worried fishers on Wallis marked out their own no-fishing zone to bring the lagoon's fish back.

🇦🇸 American Samoa · Finafinau

American Samoa's only youth-led environmental nonprofit turned 150 teenagers loose on a single beach and hauled out 4,000 pieces of trash.

🇦🇺 Australia · Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation

An Indigenous-led network is putting traditional 'cool burning' knowledge back into Aboriginal hands to heal Country and cut catastrophic bushfire risk across Australia.

🇸🇷 Suriname · Green Heritage Fund Suriname

A Paramaribo nonprofit built Suriname's only wildlife hospital for sloths, anteaters and armadillos while tracking the country's threatened river dolphins.

🇬🇾 Guyana · Iwokrama International Centre

A one-of-a-kind treaty between Guyana and the Commonwealth put 371,000 hectares of pristine rainforest under community-run, science-based management instead of the chainsaw.

🇬🇺 Guam · Guåhan Sustainable Culture

A BIPOC women-led nonprofit is rebuilding CHamoru food sovereignty on an island that imports over 90% of what it eats.

🇨🇦 Canada · Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated

Nunavut Tunngavik represents 30,000 Inuit as the legal steward of the largest Indigenous land claim settlement in Canadian history.

🇨🇦 Canada · Indigenous Leadership Initiative

First Nations, Inuit and Metis Guardians are monitoring wildlife, guarding watersheds and reviving language through Canada's fast-growing Indigenous-led land stewardship movement.

🇦🇺 Australia · Indigenous Marathon Foundation

Every year, twelve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander runners train for six months to complete the New York City Marathon, then return home as certified community health leaders.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto Socioambiental (ISA)

A São Paulo-founded institute has spent three decades mapping, litigating for and monitoring the Indigenous territories that science increasingly finds are Brazil's best defense against deforestation.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Jo-Jikum

Marshallese teenagers turn traditional weaving and songwriting into climate advocacy that reaches all the way to COP summits.

🇦🇺 Australia · Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa

Martu Traditional Owners run four ranger teams protecting threatened desert wildlife and culture across millions of hectares of Western Australia's Western Desert.

🇰🇮 Kiribati · Kiribati Climate Action Network (KiriCAN)

Kiribati's first homegrown climate NGO mobilizes women and youth to replant mangroves and carry i-Kiribati voices into UN climate negotiations.

🇦🇺 Australia · Korin Gamadji Institute

Named 'grow and emerge' by Wurundjeri Elders, Richmond Football Club's Korin Gamadji Institute uses sport and culture to build the next generation of Indigenous leaders.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN)

Indonesia's largest Indigenous alliance is racing to map millions of hectares of ancestral forest before loggers and plantations get there first.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Marshall Islands Conservation Society (MICS)

Marshallese conservationists are blending traditional atoll knowledge with science to put local communities in charge of their own reefs and fisheries.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Namibian Association of CBNRM Support Organisations (NACSO)

An umbrella alliance supporting Namibia's communal conservancies, which grant rural and indigenous communities legal rights to govern and profit from their own land and wildlife.

🇺🇸 United States · Native Seeds/SEARCH

Native Seeds/SEARCH conserves and freely shares thousands of arid-adapted heirloom seed varieties tied to Indigenous farming traditions of the American Southwest.

🌍 Global · Nia Tero

A global nonprofit that channels funding and support directly to Indigenous peoples defending and governing their own territories.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Northern Rangelands Trust

An alliance of indigenous pastoralist-led community conservancies governing millions of hectares of communally owned rangeland in northern Kenya.

🇹🇭 Thailand · Pgakenyaw Association for Sustainable Development (PASD)

A Karen (Pga k'nyau) indigenous community association defending traditional rotational farming and customary forest stewardship in northern Thailand.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Piku Biodiversity Network

Papua New Guinean schoolkids-turned-rangers from seven tribes now guard the pig-nosed turtles their communities once hunted.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Namati

Community paralegals trained by Namati are helping Sierra Leonean villages fight exploitative land leases and win back territory signed away without their consent.

🇺🇾 Uruguay · Aves Uruguay

Uruguay's oldest bird conservation NGO maps and defends the grasslands and wetlands that keep 450 species aloft.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · HUTAN

A grassroots NGO run largely by the local Orang Sungai community has replanted over 246,000 trees to stitch Borneo's fragmented rainforest back together for wild orangutans.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · PanNature (People and Nature Reconciliation / Trung tâm Con người và Thiên nhiên)

A Vietnamese conservation NGO is replanting native trees to stitch two protected forests back together into one wildlife corridor for the endangered white-cheeked gibbon.

🇺🇸 United States · Sogorea Te' Land Trust

The first urban Indigenous women-led land trust in the US is quietly buying and receiving back parcels of Ohlone territory across the San Francisco Bay Area, acre by acre.

🇮🇶 Iraq · Nature Iraq

Iraq's first conservation NGO fights to keep the Garden of Eden's marshes alive as upstream dams and drought squeeze the water that sustains the Marsh Arabs.

🇦🇺 Australia · Cape York Land Council

Since 1990, this Traditional Owner-run legal service has helped hand native title over four-fifths of the Cape York Peninsula back to its Aboriginal custodians.

🇵🇪 Peru · Instituto de Montaña (The Mountain Institute Peru)

As tropical glaciers retreat, Andean communities are digging out 1,000-year-old canals and reservoirs to keep water flowing through the dry season.

🇾🇪 Yemen · Socotra Dragon Blood Tree Association

French and Socotri islanders are raising community tree nurseries, beehives and water pipelines to save Socotra's iconic, storm-battered dragon blood trees.

🇫🇮 Finland · Snowchange Cooperative

A Finnish cooperative buys up ruined peat-mining land and lets local and Sámi communities rewild it back into carbon-storing wetlands.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Fundación Kara Solar

Indigenous Achuar communities in Ecuador's Amazon build and pilot solar-powered river canoes that replace gasoline outboard motors.

🇺🇸 United States · Native Renewables

An Indigenous-led nonprofit installs off-grid solar and battery systems for Navajo and Hopi families still living without electricity.

🇺🇸 United States · Soul Fire Farm

On 80 acres in upstate New York, a Black- and Indigenous-led farm is training a new generation of farmers of color while feeding families locked out of the food system.

🇬🇾 Guyana · Caiman House

An Indigenous-owned research station in the Rupununi runs one of only two black caiman research projects on Earth, funding a village library with every visitor.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Te Pou Tupua

After a 140-year campaign by Whanganui Maori, New Zealand's third-longest river became the first river on Earth recognized in law as a living being with its own rights.

🇨🇰 Cook Islands · Te Ipukarea Society (TIS)

The Cook Islands' longest-running environmental watchdog pairs traditional raui reef closures with modern science to defend a 1.9-million-square-kilometre ocean nation.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Te Kōhanga Reo National Trust

Since 1982, whānau-run Kōhanga Reo language nests have immersed tens of thousands of Māori children in te reo Māori from birth, reviving a language once on the brink of loss.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Tenkile Conservation Alliance

In Papua New Guinea's remote Torricelli Mountains, a community-run alliance turned a hunting moratorium into a tripling of the critically endangered tenkile tree kangaroo.

🇸🇧 Solomon Islands · Tetepare Descendants' Association

Tetepare Descendants' Association is an indigenous landowner group protecting the largest uninhabited, unlogged island in the South Pacific.

🌍 Global · International Land Coalition (ILC)

Hosted by IFAD in Rome, ILC unites more than 300 civil society and intergovernmental members across 86 countries to fight land grabbing and secure tenure rights for farmers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples and women.

🇵🇪 Peru · Rainforest Foundation US

A legal title is often the only thing standing between an Indigenous Amazon community and the bulldozers, so this program puts mapping tools and titling paperwork directly in communities' hands.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT)

UCRT helps Maasai, Hadzabe, Datoga and other pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities in northern Tanzania win legally binding titles to the rangeland their livelihoods depend on.

🇳🇺 Niue · Tofia Niue

A tiny raised-coral nation partnered with its own community NGO to put its entire ocean territory under protection.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Union de Cooperativas Tosepan

Tens of thousands of Nahua and Totonac families in Mexico's Sierra Norte de Puebla run their own cooperative economy, organic coffee, community finance, housing and forests, outside the reach of intermediaries.

🇫🇲 Micronesia · Waa'gey

Master carvers on Yap's remote outer islands are teaching the next generation to hand-build ocean-going canoes and navigate by the stars, keeping millennia-old wayfinding knowledge alive.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Waan Aelõñ in Majel (WAM)

A Majuro boatyard turns at-risk Marshallese youth into master canoe builders, reviving ancient seafaring skills as a path to jobs and cultural pride.

🇦🇺 Australia · ALFA (NT) Limited

Aboriginal-owned ALFA (NT) Limited pays Traditional Owners to burn Arnhem Land the old way, turning ancient fire knowledge into carbon credits that fund rangers and community programs.