First Peoples Worldwide Grants for Indigenous Community Projects

Less than .01% of the world’s development funding goes directly to Indigenous communities, including the funding that is intended to benefit them. We believe that donors are failing to recognize the capacity of Indigenous communities to assess and meet the challenges they face. Putting resources in the hands of communities on the local level allows them to address their specific challenges in ways that best suit their people, their culture, and their unique set of assets. Our goal is to ensure that Indigenous communities have access to funds through a channel that values and respects their expertise, their ideas, and their voices.

At the center of First Peoples Worldwide’s Indigenous development work is our Keepers of the Earth Fund, which is designed to provide funding to locally-initiated development projects in Indigenous communities around the world. Our grants range from US$500 to US$20,000, and go to projects that are conceived and implemented by Indigenous communities themselves.

PRESERVING INDIGENOUS ASSETS
We award grants to projects that seek to control, utilize, leverage, retain, create, and increase the assets of Indigenous communities. Among these assets are land, culture, language, kinship networks, subsistence activities and personal efficacy. Projects may be geared toward addressing issues such as food security, securing rights to ancestral lands, mitigating the effects of climate change, or preserving and renewing cultural values and traditional knowledge. We follow an Indigenous development model that values wholeness and balance, in which the diverse assets of the community must be developed in synchrony.

Click here to learn more about the impact our grants are having, or visit our Grantee Highlights page to learn more about specific projects.

MAKING GRANT APPLICATION ACCESSIBLE
Our grant applications are open-format and are intended to allow prospective grantees to propose projects in whatever manner suits them. We also accept video applications in order to provide an alternative to inherently confining written proposals, and to reduce our reliance on the English language and linear proposal structures. This helps ensure that the grant proposal, and the project itself, truly originate with and represent the worldview of the community.

WORKING WITH OUR COMMUNITIES
For us, grant making is not about making financial transactions. We focus on culturally appropriate development, which means facilitating changes within our communities that are consistent with their values, not just better for their economies. We also connect grantees with each other, and provide new ways to share what they are learning with a broader community. We use the grant making process to build a collaborative network of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities around the world.

Guidelines for Grant Applicants and Frequently Asked Questions

Want to support a community project? Learn how to get involved on our Join A Project page.

Application Guidelines

We award Keepers of the Earth grants to projects that empower Indigenous communities. This encompasses a wide range of projects, and we try not to place too many restrictions on what type of project we will fund.

All applicants must:

● Be Indigenous-led or represent an Indigenous-led project
● Be a grassroots/local organization or group
● Have an organizational bank account or access to a fiscal sponsor

Due to limited grant money and the focus of our grantmaking mission,
WE DO NOT FUND:

● Projects that do not originate from or are not led by an Indigenous community
● Travel to the United States
● Disaster relief
● Missionary Projects
● Fees associated with lawsuit proceedings or representation
● Electoral campaign activities
● Conference registration fees
● Work being done by an individual
● Scholarships or school application fees
● Event fundraising, fundraising campaigns, costs associated with the soliciting of endowment funds, or deficit funding

The largest possible grant award is US$20,000. Grant amounts for first-time applicants range from $500 to $5,000. If you have been awarded a Keepers of the Earth grant before and your project was successful, your next project is more likely to be approved for a larger grant.

At First Peoples Worldwide, we don’t see ourselves as gatekeepers of funding, but as partners with our communities. We have crafted our grant-making process to be an equal and reciprocal dialogue with our grantees. Our grant criteria are based on whether proposed projects share our values, goals, and philosophy in supporting Indigenous Peoples.

PROJECT CRITERIA
Here are the basic questions we ask ourselves when considering a grant proposal:

IS THE PROJECT COMMUNITY INITIATED?
It is important for Indigenous communities to be in control of their own development—and therefore their own destinies. First Peoples Worldwide strongly prefers to fund development projects that are imagined and implemented by communities without intermediaries. Where communities apply for grants through outside organizations, we expect to see that the community itself has initiated the project and intends to take responsibility for implementing the project over the long term.

IS THE PROJECT HOLISTIC IN ITS APPROACH?
In evaluating a grant application, we look for projects that incorporate social, environmental, economic, and cultural concerns equally while addressing the immediate needs of the community. It is essential that proposals demonstrate an approach based on the interconnectedness of people, assets and environment. For example, we would likely fund a project that brings community members together to build clean-water wells that are designed to help preserve watershed ecosystems while providing a source of income for the builders. We fund projects that nourish all of the community’s assets, including traditional knowledge, community solidarity, and cultural identity.

IS THE PROJECT VALUES BASED?
In essence, our grant-making strategy focuses on values. It is from a community’s cultural values that it gains its sense of vision and weighs its choices within the context of the larger world. we believe positive and lasting changes are always made with these values in mind.

The common values that Indigenous communities share include the concepts of reciprocity and sharing, respect, responsibility, caring for and honoring one another, and the interdependence of all life. We look at grant proposals on a case-by-case basis to assess whether these concepts are present in the project design, and favor those that clearly express their intentions to incorporate these values into their work. A community without a sense of purpose, belonging, and meaningful life will not benefit from economic development.

Ready to apply? Click here to begin.

Have more questions? Check out our Frequently Asked Questions page.