Prize Year: 2021

Extinction Rebellion Youth Solidarity

Extinction Rebellion Youth Solidarity fights for liberation as a youth-led environmental group actively practising solidarity. They resist white supremacy, heteropatriarchal dominance, imperialism, speciesism and all forms of oppression, in solidarity with Indigenous and local communities.

The group has emerged through working together for a youth mobilisation based on solidarity. They have created actions, events and campaigns: their work is their answer to the question of how to live and resist well, while taking on the journey of unlearning oppressive mindsets and learning how to embody non-violence.

Spaces and sparks created include:

  • Exploring decolonisation in Education and Environmentalism with grassroots educators and Maasai leaders
  • Collaborated on a 5-day educational event at Imperial College London, calling to Decolonise, Decarbonise, and Democratise.
  • Influenced landmark judicial land rights case in Brasil supporting Guaranì Mbya community, organizing an open letter to the judge.
  • Produced and disseminated Climate Crisis is a Racist Crisis within XR UK.
  • Organized The Future of Conservation: COP26 and Beyond, involving 5 Indigenous and local-community leaders from Africa and Abya Yala.

Malawi Schools Permaculture Clubs

Malawi Schools Permaculture Clubs (MSPC) trains teachers in northern Malawi to run after-school student permaculture clubs. Through the clubs, students learn permaculture concepts and skills and apply them directly on their school grounds & create polyculture garden patches to grow indigenous foodcrops.

Now in their 6th year, MSPC has expanded to work with 22 schools, reached over 2,000 participants and trained 120 teachers. They have developed session packs and training for teachers, and provided basic inputs like tools and seeds to get schools started, whilst increasing the input of community members in the project.

They are now preparing to launch a partner programme, to support NGOs in other regions to establish permaculture clubs and teacher support networks. They are also a pilot project for the Permaculture Evaluation Toolkit (PET), helping to test-run a model for assessment of impact for grassroots permaculture programmes, to increase the rigour of their impact analysis and accessible tools in the wider permaculture movement.

Education for Climate Action for Peace (E4CAP)

Education for Climate Action for Peace (E4CAP) was birthed in October 2019 to combat adverse climate change and to provide sustainable living education and livelihood preparedness training to refugees and stateless teens and youths that don’t have access to mainstream education and cannot work legally in Malaysia. E4CAP is a collaboration between PDC alumni, including refugee teens. The latter leads Teens4CAP initiatives.

Since 2019, they have organised and supported:
· Introduction to Permaculture Workshop (3 batches)
· Teens4CAP ‘Eco-Edible Urban Gardening’ Online Course (6 batches);
· Teens Celebration for World Soil Day & World Environment Day in Malaysia;
· World Soil Day Awards for Teens;
· 3-Month Vocational Internship on Sustainable Living (3 batches);
· ‘Garden to Table’ cooking video series for UCSI University and Living Lab;
· e-commerce for UCSI Living Lab for selling crops and seeds;
· Providing vegetables to refugee centres and 20 single mother refugee families;
· Starter veggie pots for 70 low income families;
· The design and set-up of edible gardens at an Alzheimer centre, a school for special need children, and UCSI University and College.

Sacha Kuyrana Maltakuna – Young Kichwa Defenders of the Forest

Sachawaysa, Ecuador is in a beautiful hilly location, where the Amazon forest meets the foothills of the Andes at 900 meters elevation. The community has self-organized to work honestly, proactively, and transparently to regenerate Kichwa culture, and forests, which were almost destroyed by the Spanish settlement in the region which brought hostile attitudes and actions towards Kichwa people, their customs and regional rainforests.

Sacha Kuyrana Maltakuna – Young Kichwa Defenders of the Forest plan to buy a one hectare property, build a simple office with local materials, and map, design, and plant an ancestral home garden with dozens of fruit, nut, palm, medicinal, and hardwoods, including traditional species which help to improve soils, and short cycle plants and fungi, such as edible mushrooms collected from the forest. They will develop an online Kichwa vegetarian recipe book, full of traditional foods and recipes, to share with young people in the region.

Young people will organise and participate in projects, and will ask the grandparents (elders) for advice on values, on projects and how to successfully extend their work to benefit surrounding communities.

RE-PEAT

Because peatlands are the largest land-based carbon stores in the world, their degradation results in large amounts of carbon emissions (5% of global emissions caused by humans). But it is not just the carbon power that is so special about peatlands.

Youth-led collective RE-PEAT believe that peatlands should be a vital part of ecological and climate conversations. They also see that discussions about peatlands can create very novel viewpoints on other intersecting topics such as social justice, health, economics, language and history.

Their work, based across Europe, follows 3 major pathways: education, collaboration and re-imagination. Examples of how they do this include: developing a primary school education program to foster awareness from a young age, as a scalable pilot project starting in Ireland they hope to launch this in many more schools next year; collecting personal and artistic accounts of peatlands from across Europe in a EU Peat Anthology, prior to the Common Agricultural Policy decision by the EU Members of Parliament; hosting two 24hour global peat festivals that, combined, included over 80 online talks and sessions; creating a 10-part series of webinars focusing on UK peatlands to build momentum before COP26 and the WCSS22 in Glasgow.

Over the next 5 years they hope to build an international youth network for peatlands, push for bolder peatland policy, as well as work to amplify underrepresented voices.

Photo: RE-PEAT

SCOPE Kenya

Founded in 2014, Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme (SCOPE Kenya), is a local capacity building & networking development organisation, that promotes permaculture/agroecology education, in schools & communities.

They do this to nurture youth in sustainable land use practices, to enhance restoration & resilience of the ecosystem for food production, income generation & biodiversity conservation, to benefit the current & future generations. They integrate young people in and out of school, in matters of sustainable development and natural resources management, by connecting them with nature and culture.

They use a holistic development approach, which involves working with pupils, teachers, parents, local leaders & surrounding communities, Integrated Land Use Design tools, to redesign and facilitate transformation of degraded land into, greener productive landscapes, with conservation systems, using permaculture/agroecology practices.

Their achievements include introduced their process in 16 schools, training 20 field staff and 27 school teachers in permaculture/agroecology, facilitated the establishment of 12 permaculture model schools to enable them to produce healthy food to support own feeding programs, development of agroecology training guide for use by field staff, to nurture young people.

Permatil Global

Empowering people through community-driven permaculture projects since 2001, Permatil recognised the urgent need to regenerate Timor-Leste’s natural environment and create sustainable livelihoods and resilient communities, while strengthening culture and traditional knowledge.

Their work includes:

  • Planning and implementing permaculture projects with communities across Timor-Leste
  • Training of future trainers – including NGO and government staff, community leaders and local farmers – in water and soil conservation, agro-ecology, agro-forestry, aquaculture and organic farming
  • Establishing a national farmer’s food sovereignty network
  • Water restoration and preservation projects to rehabilitate springs and store water in the ground in 174 communities
  • Producing Timorese educational resources including illustrated readers, films, posters and the Permaculture Guidebook from Timor-Leste, 2008
  • Producing the Tropical Permaculture Guidebook, 2018, accessed online on a ‘pay-what-you-can’ basis
  • Incorporating a permaculture school gardens program in the national primary school curriculum, a global first.
  • Advocating with government, private sector and communities for permaculture-based change

Permatil would like to build more awareness of their work in the region, to help and inspire other groups to see the benefits of, and get involved in permaculture, through school gardens, water conservation, tree planting and youth ‘in action’ projects and start collaborating with similar organisations on future projects.

Photo: Permatil Global

The Marginalized Mirror

The Marginalized Mirror will provide knowledge sharing around responsible investments in agriculture and food systems for the marginalized Ovazemba communities in Namibia to produce their own organic food through regenerative agriculture for resilience to climatic instability.

The current and future impact of COVID-19 on the Ovazemba Indigenous community, compounded by the harsh reality of Namibia’s nationwide economic crisis, restricted movements, and recurring droughts, is immeasurable. The community depends on the production of crops and livestock. The droughts have resulted in the loss of sources of dairy products and traditional crops normally planted during the rainy season. With the restricted movement of people due to COVID-19 regulations, pastoralists are unable to head livestock to neighboring countries with better rainfall like Angola for better grazing pastures.

The project will provide training on crop production under an irrigation system to produce food and fodder for human and livestock production and sell the surplus for income generation. They aim to support a community-based irrigation project managed by Indigenous Ovazemba community members who will run the project sustainably for themselves and future generations.

Fundación Pachamama

Fundación Pachamama is a NGO with more than 23 years of experience working with the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon region. Its work aims to strengthen indigenous organizations, defend indigenous peoples’ land rights and promote alternative development models.

In partnership with the Indigenous Nations of the Amazon rainforest, they have protected millions of acres of pristine rainforest from oil and other extractive industries.

Fundación Pachamama is promoting a new Initiative called the Amazon Sacred Headwaters (ASHI). ASHI aims to permanently protect 86+ million acres of tropical rainforests in the headwaters of the Amazon River–the Napo and Marañon Basins of Ecuador and Peru.

ASHI will convene indigenous peoples, civil society and governments to establish a bi-national protected region, off-limits to industrial scale resource extraction and governed in accordance with traditional indigenous principles. This is the first holistic planning effort to address the key issues affecting such a large bioregion in the Amazon Basin.

Photo: Fundación Pachamama

Meli Bees Network

Meli Bees Network brings systemic regenerative support to the most endangered areas in the Amazon. They do so by working together with local traditional communities, engaging them in a Network of trust, where they can connect with other traditional communities to interact, share experiences and find support to develop regenerative practices.

Meli already has members from more than 15 different groups of Amazonian traditional communities – Indigenous villages, quilombos and smallholder “assentamentos”. They aim to learn about their stories, local reality, wishes and skills – and from there find the best practices to work with. Meli also connects them with the needed technical and scientific support and provides the tools needed to develop the best practices to have a social and environmental positive impact, such as education, agroecology and native beekeeping.

They hope to be able to reach hundreds of communities in the next five years, and at the same time develop a deep connection with each one of them.