For many of our grassroots partners, often Indigenous communities living in close relationship with the ecosystems of their ancestral territories, accessing the the Earth Defenders Toolkit (EDT) platform has been a challenge due to a lack of internet connectivity. To address this challenge, we created Kakawa, an offline version of the EDT, drawing on our […]

Comunidades de todo el mundo han estado utilizando Terrastories como una herramienta digital para documentar historias en forma de vídeo o audio, al tiempo que las conectan con lugares en un mapa. Estos esfuerzos suelen estar vinculados a procesos comunitarios profundos, locales e internos, como los de revitalización lingüística, archivo comunitario y defensa del territorio. […]

Indigenous women play a key role in land defense strategies around the world and are critical guardians of global biodiversity. Last May, Digital Democracy held an Earth Defenders Gathering in the Ecuadorian Amazon, bringing together women from Indigenous territories around the world. The time they spent together sharing their strategies, and the friendships they cultivated, are […]

The Train the Trainers methodology is a tool for empowering communities to build confidence and skills in a culturally relevant and accessible way while promoting as much autonomy and sustainability as possible.

To remedy the high learning curve that comes with understanding information technology, trainings focused on using a digital tool should be accompanied by training in basic tech literacy focused on components of this broader ecosystem in which the tool lives.

A common theme that has come out of conversations with partners about earth defender needs is figuring out where and how to get started. Many earth defender communities are aware of the emerging threats or problems within their community or their lands, but are less sure about what kind of actions to take, and rarely start directly from the point of view of wanting to make a map or conducting monitoring. Instead, it may be necessary to start thinking more broadly and to ground the conversation in something central to the lifeworld of the community: the territory.

In our research and years of accompanying partner communities in using digital technologies, we have found that mapping can be one of the most effective ways of building skills in using technology, because mapping already involves something that community members already have quite a lot of knowledge about: the territory, lands, and waters.

Because mapping projects invariably involve conversations about the land or water, they can help restart processes of knowledge transmission that have become stilted due to these influences of modernity or colonialism, and allow communities to record and archive local knowledge.

Maps made by earth defender communities are a representation of their lands from their point of view, and frequently present a much different picture than the maps made by the outside world. ?️

Like any powerful tool, technology can be immensely positive, but can also have unintended outcomes that go far beyond the scope of the project. In earth defender work, awareness and transparency around technology introduction is key.