Hi, I'm Eva
I am the Executive Director of Global Greengrants Fund UK, a participatory grantmaking fund supporting grassroots environmental and social justice initiatives around the world.
I joined Global Greengrants Fund UK in 2015. Prior to this, my career had been mostly in human rights, working as a Project Advisor for Amnesty International and Project Manager for CIVICUS/Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, and I was keen to continue my career specifically working on climate justice and the connection of human rights and environmental protection. Incidentally, my very first job out of uni was working on Scotland's first biodiversity strategy! Global Greengrants Fund is the perfect place to bring all my interests and passions together.
We make small grants to seedfund innovative environmental protection initiatives led by grassroots actors, particularly those who are mostly marginalised in natural resource management decision-making: women, youth, indigenous peoples and people with disabilities. Globally, we support over 1,000 initiatives per year with the help of volunteer advisors.
I will be sharing more about our work in particular in supporting women-led conservation and environmental initiatives during the WildHub Deep Dive at Earth Optimism Summit April 2020l! If you would like a teaser, check out my recent blog on Wildhub.
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Hi Eva. Thanks for your great work. In addition to seed-funds, how else does your organization or can any organization support women-led conservation? What else do your reciepents indicate they need to be successful?
Thank you. -K Curran (Pew Charitable Trusts)
Hi K,
Sorry we didn't get to your great question during the panel.
As you can imagine, there are lot of very context specific responses to your question, but very generally speaking, we found that the first step is to be mindful of the different ways that women and men are experiencing environmental degradation/biodiversity loss and consequently how they are devising conservation solutions. Too often still we don't have a full gender-aggregated picture of impacts, so research and analysis into gender-differentiated impacts and responses is another key need in addition to funding.
Applying a gender lens then permeates all stages of interventions - down to when activities are scheduled to take place. Are they happening when women are needed elsewhere due to child care or other caring responsibilities? Are there women-only spaces, especially important in strict patriarchal communities?
The last thing I would mention here is that the transfer of money is also a transfer of power - when women are given decision-making power over the use of funds, we often see increased confidence, greater trust from the community in the women, and consequently greater involvement in wider decision-making. So even if it is just a small grant, the gesture of an outsider trusting and investing in the women's solutions can have incredible ripple effects. This is the sweet spot where we advance gender equality and conservation aims!
Let me know if you'd ever like a deeper chat on this, and thanks for your question! Eva