Forest Visions Donor Prospectus

When their land rights are secured, indigenous peoples and forest peoples play a vital role in conservation, restoration, and the sustainable management of their territories. Their leadership extends beyond local landscapes, offering critical solutions to global environmental crises through their worldviews and knowledge systems. 

Yet despite this proven impact, indigenous and forest peoples face a persistent lack of access to direct financing and support, limiting their ability to combat climate change and biodiversity loss at scale. In response, we have developed a direct funding and support model: Forest Visions. 

Forest Visions is designed to respond to this gap in the funding ecosystem, by directly supporting indigenous peoples and forest peoples to realise their visions for their lands and territories, in circumstances where they or their organisations lack capacity to access donor and technical support directly. 

Our approach prioritises self-determination—providing multi-year commitments of completely flexible funding alongside as-requested technical, legal, and strategic support and mentoring from Forest Peoples Programme. This ensures that communities not only have the resources to advance their goals, but also the accompaniment and allyship needed to sustain their efforts over time. 

We can see from the first day that you did not come here to teach us things, tell us about laws or how to best live our lives. What you did was provide a space for us to talk amongst ourselves about ourselves, our past and our present. We spent our time talking about our experiences, ourselves and this is very important. We really appreciate this way of doing things…” 

Bibi Joseph, ASBABUK President, Cameroon

Contact us

The process of giving flexible funds directly to further a community’s vision, strengthens community autonomy by putting power and choice in their hands. Our team would be pleased to talk through Forest Visions and help identify which areas align with your funding goals. Please contact chris@forestpeoples.org to discuss further.