Walking Together: What does good allyship with Indigenous Peoples look like?

In September 2025 FPP hosted a sharing and movement-building event in the heart of New York Climate Week titled “Enabling a win-win-win for rights, climate and nature: What does good allyship with Indigenous Peoples look like?” The event centred on Indigenous analysis and voices, grounding the conversation through case studies presented in a new report - Valuing Allyship - that explored flexible, relationship-based funding and the other forms of solidarity that Indigenous and forest peoples seek from allies.

As the report makes clear, allyship is more than a concept - it is a set of conditions: trust built over years, funding that follows community priorities, relationships grounded in shared ownership of successes, risks and mistakes. But those conditions exist in tension with many challenges. This webinar will hold space for that complexity, extending the discussion initiated in New York and opening the conversation up to a wider audience.  

At its heart is the question of how support organisations and donors can walk closely enough to be meaningful allies, without creating the very dependency that undermines the self-determination they set out to support. This event is an opportunity to explore that question more deeply.  

We invite you to bring your own experiences and reflections. The chat will be open throughout the event for the audience to share their perspectives and submit questions to the presenters.

Who is it for?

Donor and philanthropy organisations, intermediaries and other support groups and actors working in the climate and nature space, who are interested in enabling conditions to achieve a win-win-win for Indigenous rights, climate and nature.

What will you learn?

Join us to gain a better understanding of how good allyship is defined by Indigenous and Forest Peoples themselves. What does good allyship look like? What kinds of added value are needed from allies? How can the support and donor ecosystem best meet those needs? And how can dependency and unintended undermining be mitigated? 

Valuing Allyship

The value of channelling much more funding directly to grassroots Indigenous Peoples and forest peoples is gaining recognition in climate and nature funding circles, and rightly so.

Direct and unrestricted funding is crucial to rebalancing power dynamics and finding lasting solutions, but it is rarely enough on its own. Achieving real change depends on more than how much funding is allocated in this way. It also depends on how those funds are aligned with the self-determined priorities of communities, and the kinds of additional, enabling support needed alongside the funding to maximise impact.

The briefing presents six stories from longstanding partners of Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Each case highlights how transformation is made possible when financial resources are coupled with context-specific, responsive and long-term non-financial support underpinned by deep-rooted, trusting and transparent relationships. 

• To read the briefing, please click this link: Valuing Allyship: The case for pairing direct and unrestricted funding with solidarity-based allyship for grassroots Indigenous Peoples and forest peoples.