Partners
Long-Term Partnerships Set the Path for Sustainable Change
Thousand Currents is guided by one powerful truth: the most profound, lasting, and transformative change comes from social movements. These movements—dynamic, diverse, and grassroots-led—comprise countless groups, communities, and individuals and outpace any single organization in their power to reshape the world. Our mission is to learn from them, resource them, amplify their work, and collectively forge a path toward a just future.
Our grantmaking approach centers long-term, trust-based, and movement-led relationships of at least 10 years. We build relationships to accompany the ups and downs of social transformation. We provide flexible funding, allowing our partners to allocate resources where they need them. We also support our partners by responding to emergent challenges and needs along the way. We understand that this is what it takes to make the path together.
In fiscal 2024, we mobilized unprecedented resources for movements advancing food sovereignty, climate justice, and economic justice across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. To match their scale and boldness, we:
- Increased annual grants to $100,000 for 75 long-term partners
- Provided 36 emergency grants in response to crises like flooding, droughts, earthquakes, cyclones, and fires, as well as for legal action and security for activists
- Fueled innovation through 14 Spark grants to partners leading new, community-driven solutions to complex challenges
- Supplemented diverse tactics—from strategic litigation and popular education to cultural production and grassroots campaigns—in recognition that movements need multiple tactics to drive systemic change
Over the past year, our movement partners made powerful strides toward reshaping our world, advancing transformative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Read on to meet three of our movement partners and learn about their work.
Transforming the Way We Grow Our Food
Movements are demonstrating that agroecology is more than a way to grow food—it is a revolutionary approach to cooling the planet and securing food sovereignty. Agroecology regenerates the soil and enhances biodiversity, offering a powerful, sustainable, and locally rooted response to the climate crisis. Farmer-led networks are scaling these practices, pushing for policies that protect their right to land and indigenous seeds, and strengthening local markets to sustain farming families and communities.
One powerful example is the Kenyan Peasants League (KPL). When the Kenyan government lifted a decade-long ban on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), KPL mobilized rapidly, winning a legal victory that reinstated the ban and safeguarded food sovereignty.
Even though the Kenyan government has already appealed this legal decision, KPL’s work goes beyond resistance through legal action; they actively promote agroecology by supporting indigenous seed systems, building cooperatives, and ensuring that communities have access to healthy, culturally appropriate food.
Why it matters
GMOs threaten food systems’ genetic diversity, which is essential for ecosystems to adapt to changing climates, diseases, and pests. In contrast, indigenous seeds are resilient, regenerative, and healthier. By protecting the right to grow indigenous foods, movements like KPL are not only defending people's cultures and livelihoods but also strengthening food systems and protecting our planet.
Protecting Forests to Cool the Planet
Forests are one of the most powerful carbon sinks on the planet, absorbing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and regulating Earth’s climate. Yet they face relentless destruction from industrial agriculture, mining, and other harmful practices. On the contrary, when Indigenous and local communities steward their lands, they use collective governance models to regenerate forests, protect biodiversity, and sequester carbon.
The Southern Peasants’ Federation of Thailand (SPFT) practices this approach. By reclaiming land from monoculture palm oil plantations, they are transforming barren lands into thriving, self-managed ecosystems. They operate cooperatives where farmers sell their produce and communities can better sustain healthy livelihoods. SPFT is an example of what’s possible when communities reclaim the power to determine their own future.
Why it matters
The ongoing destruction of thousands of hectares of forests each year accelerates climate change, threatening our collective future. Often this is done to expand farming or mining or to build roads or large projects. Studies show that lands managed by Indigenous and local communities protect 80% of global biodiversity, making them a critical force against environmental degradation.
Keeping Fossil Fuels in the Ground
The science is clear: to prevent catastrophic climate change, we must keep fossil fuels in the ground. At this pivotal moment in history, the choices we make will either accelerate a spiraling climate and ecological crisis or restore a more balanced relationship between humanity and nature. Despite governments and industry pledging to do better, their promises have been largely empty or insufficient to truly mend the destruction. Movements led by Indigenous and local communities are at the forefront of this fight, often facing violent opposition. They are not only protecting their lands and cultures but are standing between the world and the most severe impacts of climate change.
Coletivo Audiovisual Wakoborun, an audiovisual collective that’s part of Associação das Mulheres Munduruku Wakoborun, is amplifying this resistance through powerful cultural production. Using film, poetry, and other art forms, Munduruku youth document the impacts of mining and deforestation, reclaiming their narratives and resisting extractivism. Their upcoming documentary, “Awaydip Tip Mutaxipi / The Sick Forest,” is the first feature-length film produced by the Munduruku people, bringing global attention to their struggle against extractivism.
Why it matters
Keeping fossil fuels underground is our best chance at limiting global temperature rise. Indigenous communities, by defending their territories, ways of life, and livelihoods, are safeguarding critical ecosystems and charting a path toward a renewable, just future.
