Program Strategies

In late 2002 the Fund decided to develop a new program strategy and focus grant making on the interface between natural environments and human cultures, primarily working with peoples and communities variously known as "indigenous", "tribal" and "minority", and the landscapes with which their cultures, histories and artistic expression are so connected.  Towards this end the Fund has consulted extensively with people and institutions that know and care about these issues, especially in our priority regions, and is currently finalizing grant-making strategies for each program area which we hope to share with grantees and other stakeholders for comment before the end of 2005.  Shaping the development of these new strategies are a number of principles.  One of these is a "resilience" and "sovereignty" perspective that suggests that rather than developing management structures attempting to freeze and preserve existing cultures or ecologies, better results can be achieved by supporting their own internal processes of creativity and renewal—processes necessary to sustain them as complex, dynamic and evolving adaptive systems over time. An objective thus becomes to back locally grounded efforts to elucidate the relationships between culture and environment and to strengthen the world's capacity to maintain cultural and biological creativity and diversity going forward.

Geographic Focus

Five geographic regions have been prioritized for grant making with other interested national and international partners. These are:

• The Greater American Southwest, namely the US Four Corners region and Northwest Mexico covering the Colorado Plateau and Delta, the Pueblo and Hispanic Communities of the Rio Arriba/Rio Grande, the Sonoran Desert on both sides of the Mexican-US border (east of the Colorado River), and the Sierra Tarahumara.
• Montane West and Central Asia, currently focusing on the mountains and associated valleys of Northeast Turkey, the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan.
• The Rift Valley of Ethiopia (especially southwest Ethiopia), and adjacent areas of Northern Kenya
• Northern Australia, currently focused on Arnhem Land, Far Northern Queensland, the Kimberley and the Torres Strait Islands
• Melanesia, likely initial focus Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, alongside regional networking and collaborations 

Each of these regions is marked by exceptional cultural and biological diversity within dramatic physical landscapes; thus each possesses the kinds of heterogeneity that may better enable resilience in the face of the vicissitudes of global climatic change and other disturbances. Though somewhat isolated today, each region has also served as a major historical and evolutionary powerhouse and crossroads for the world's cultural and biological diversity and heritage. Each displays rich traditions of artistic expression, resource use and landscape management. Furthermore their local societies—the principal anticipated partners of TCF—are winning—through more healthy relationships with their nation states—greater choice over the futures of their cultures, arts, languages, lands and environments, enabling them to negotiate for themselves the changes coming with the 21st century. As citizens and as holders of resource rights to traditional territories, as well as purveyors of indigenous knowledge and resource ethics now being integrated with a more respectful conservation science, these communities can make a very big difference to the future of the world's diversity as well as to their own societies and places. Similarly from an arts perspective we must value their contemporary creativity—with its frequently skilled disruption of mainstream society's categories and stereotypes and its explorations of new aesthetics—as well as securing continuities with their historic grace and diversity of form.

Emerging Thematic Interests in the Priority Regions

Some of the things we would like to support through our new strategies will include:

·         the persistence and adaptation of indigenous systems for managing landscapes that sustain cultural and biological value and diversity;

·         maintaining the diverse agricultural, hunting, gathering and cooking traditions that sustain community foodways, diets, livelihoods and wellbeing; including the traditional varieties of crops first domesticated in our geographic regions essential for the future of agriculture globally;

·         artistic and cultural expression—both traditional and contemporary—to maintain continuities of relationship with place and the experience of the natural world, including music, dance and associated expression; and

·         “bothways” education in indigenous societies that better enables people to access and value both heritage and innovation within their own societies, as well as engage richly with the rest of the world. 

We have also been deeply challenged by field observation of dramatic climate change already underway in our regions, and the need to enhance resilience if life in these regions is to adapt and sustain.

Program Announcement

2010 Christensen@Five

2010 Carmen Christensen

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