Indigenous women are pushing back at the systems that are threatening their rights and lives across the Amazon Basin.

As defenders of land, water, and life, Indigenous women are bringing global attention to the destruction of the Amazon, resisting extractive industries, building a pan-Amazon movement, and ensuring the future of their homes and of our climate. They are keeping standing forests standing. Today, you can be a part of this rising movement of women defenders of the Amazon!

Long-time Amazon Watch supporter Lynn Thorensen has made a generous seed grant of $50,000 in honor and memory of her son Dru for the official launch of the Women Defenders Program at Amazon Watch. This program will support Indigenous women’s leadership, safety, and solutions, and fund:

• land ownership in Indigenous women’s names;
• Indigenous women’s full participation in public life and decision-making roles;
• spaces for healing, retreats, organizing, trainings, and gatherings;
• accompaniment to national and global convenings to ensure that Indigenous women’s solutions are centered in rainforest policy;
• and sustained economic and healing initiatives including regenerative agriculture and forest medicine for Indigenous women’s self-determination.

Your support will be distributed directly to women defenders of the Amazon to support initiatives including the purchase of land and a house for Mujeres Amazónicas, a collective of Indigenous women in the Ecuadorian Amazon, who have designed this plan as an act of land back and for a space of healing, safety, and movement-building.

Together, with your support, we will act in solidarity with the growing movement of Indigenous women throughout the Amazon for the future we know is possible. Full details about this fundraiser and a reflection from Lynn about her son Dru are available at amazonwatch.org/donate-women-defenders.