Areas of Work

Climate Justice

Climate change is one of the greatest existential challenges of our time. This is a human crisis that requires us to transform our collective institutions, practices, and behaviors. In order to do so, we must lean into interdependence, well-being, and care for all living species.

Thousand Currents funds movements working to respect, defend, and protect Mother Earth. We support their initiatives to keep a check on rising global temperatures, and live sustainably within planetary boundaries. We partner with climate justice advocates who are building systems that address and transform historical and contemporary systems that perpetuate oppressive, exploitative, and extractive practices. We recognize their contributions in nourishing what we have and looking at the root of the present climate crisis from a social justice perspective.

Our movement partners:

• fight to stop fossil fuel extraction and for community-owned and controlled renewable energy infrastructure de-commodify natural resources and spaces
• enact and struggle for the sustainable use, collective management, and equitable access of our natural resources
• reduce communities’ vulnerability to natural disasters
• combat toxic waste and pollution

Economic Justice

Our current global economic system is based on exploitation and profit maximization that sacrifice and harm our most vulnerable communities and the planet. To build towards a vision where all communities are thriving and living with dignity, we need a shift to new economic systems based on justice, care, interdependence, abundance, and regeneration.

Thousand Currents funds community-determined economic systems and practices where the means of production, power and decision-making sits with the workers, where resources are stewarded and distributed equitably so that people can live a dignified life, and where the driving logic of any economic encounter is the wellbeing of the planet and people.

Our movement partners:

• ensure healthy, safe, and dignified working conditions
• operate and engage the broader community through principles of mutual aid and solidarity
• create ecologically regenerative worker owned cooperatives
• generate livelihoods based on sustainable production and consumption resist extractive industries and corporate power

Food Sovereignty 

At a meeting held in Mali in West Africa in 2007, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, landless peoples, rural workers, urban movements, migrants, pastoralists, and forest communities from 80 countries issued the Nyéléni Declaration on Food Sovereignty, which defined food sovereignty as “the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems.”

Taking the lead from the Nyéléni Declaration, Thousand Currents funds food systems transformation driven by Indigenous stewards of land and territory and the people who are the primary producers of food for most of the world.

Our movement partners:

• fortify local food systems that optimize biodiversity
• advance sustainable food production methods, healthy ecosystems, and public health through agroecology
• build farmer managed seed systems to protect local resources and knowledge systems
• create market linkages that are owned and operated by smallholder farmers
• resist land dispossession and are building collective land stewardship practices and models
• educate, advocate, and resist governments in order to put smallholder farmers’ interests before those of multinational corporations