ECCP: Meet the first-ever ECCP funded projects!

The first cycle of the community fund is moving ahead with six brilliant projects.

Dear Colleagues,

It was bound to happen sometime… last week, I clicked send on an ECCP email without adding in a title for the subject line. What a nice reminder that after 5.5 years of this, I still need to revise my work. :)

This email, on the other hand, has a very important title: You’re invited to meet the first-ever ECCP funded projects! This communication is different than the usual round-up, another edition of which will be coming in another week or two.

If you’re new to the community and wondering what the ECCP Community Fund is, you can head over to our Community Fund landing page here: https://www.ecosystemforpeace.org/eccpfund.

The community fund is open for replenishment. If you or your institution have small (or large) amounts of money that need to be spend down on budget lines, let me know. We welcome contributions of all shapes and sizes, and in this email, you’ll learn more about how we use it!

Six projects; six stories

Our 2025 Community Fund projects were chosen by the ECCP, reviewed and supported by a budget committee from the ECCP, and will cycle back around to share insights and ideas with the ECCP. Our project owners have each submitted different forms of media to describe their proposals, which will all take place in the coming weeks and months.

We hope you enjoy the global tour of work that our community has the privilege to support.

Sports for peace in Kenya

Indigenous collaboration in Suriname

A community forum in Rwanda

GER-Rwanda, in partnership with the ECCP, is organizing a community forum aimed at fostering dialogue around ecosystem preservation and peacebuilding. This forum will bring together community members, youth, women, local leaders, and religious leaders to address issues and conflicts arising from environmental degradation. The goal is to create a collaborative space where participants can openly discuss these pressing challenges and develop practical, community-driven solutions that support sustainable livelihoods and lasting peace.

Building on GER’s proven track record in community engagement, the project recognizes that inclusive dialogue is key to uncovering environmental concerns and empowering communities to respond sustainably. Through this project, beneficiaries will have the opportunity to share their experiences, contribute valuable local knowledge, and build essential skills for managing natural resources responsibly and promoting peaceful coexistence.

A focus of the initiative is the critical role of women, who are often disproportionately affected by climate change. By centering their voices, the forum seeks to ensure that women’s experiences shape both local solutions and broader advocacy efforts aimed at influencing policy at higher levels. This approach will help strengthen community resilience, foster living in harmony with creation, and safeguard biodiversity for both current and future generations. The results, lessons, success stories, and practices from this pilot project will help build on and develop a project to be scaled up in other communities in Rwanda and beyond. The project will also help to increase knowledge, skills, understanding, behavior change, and practices around the ecosystem. The project will be implemented in Bugesera district of Eastern Province. (Photo copyright: GER)

An ECCP meet-up in Washington, DC

(All are welcome! Mark your calendars for 9 September, 4pm.)

Engaging Indigenous knowledge in the Amazon

Indigenous peoples of the Amazon Basin are not only among the most affected by environmental degradation, climate change, and conflict, but also among the most knowledgeable and experienced in fostering balance between people and nature. Despite being stewards of some of the planet’s most biodiverse and vital ecosystems, their voices have long been marginalized in global climate and peacebuilding arenas. At the same time, the Amazon Basin remains one of the most dangerous regions in the world for Indigenous environmental defenders, who face the highest rates of violence and murder for protecting their territories.

CDA Collaborative Learning and the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) seek to engage Indigenous groups from the Amazon Basin—specifically from Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia— in a virtual workshop over two days to explore their unique perspectives on peace and conflict to better bridge ways of knowing and global discourse on climate and conflict. Through shared experiences, cultural knowledge, and ancestral practices, the workshop will surface what peace means within Amazonian communities and how Indigenous worldviews and expertise can inform inclusive, locally-grounded environmental peacebuilding efforts across the region. The dialogue will also be a way to understand factors that can help climate finance be more supportive of Indigenous-led peacebuilding and environmental stewardship initiatives.

Amplifying Somali CSO voices in policy spaces

We’re excited.

We’re excited because this represents a pilot of micro-granting and participatory budgeting. Proposals were reviewed by a budget committee, made up of ECCP members, which operates in both English and French. Then the proposal submitters themselves got the chance to review all of the qualified submissions and actually vote on what they wanted to see move forward.

The total amount of money spent across all six projects is roughly 11,000 EUR. That’s it. We’ll bring the community a second round of information later in the year to share what our project owners have learned, and what some of the interesting outcomes of these projects have been.

We’re also hoping to plan a learning session later this year to create space for all of us to reflect on the model and learn forward.

Remember: The ECCP Community Fund will be replenished with a minimum of 10,000 CHF for 2026. We’re open for additional financial contributions, and would love to grow this approach of community-led participatory funding.

Thank you.

Finally, I’ll close with a few words of thanks. Thank you to all who submitted project proposals, both successful and unsuccessful. We appreciate your engagement with the fund.

Thank you to our Budget Committee, who invested much time and energy into this process: Winfred Mugambwa, Erik Mikalano, Jaime Gongora, Diana Campos, and Trizah Eyenae. I also give my thanks to community members who helped review translations about information on the fund in French & Spanish to make the process more inclusive.

And thank you to the people and institutions who are making this possible. In particular, to Eliza Urwin and Gabi Buser through our co-host, the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding for managing the administrative and financial aspects, as well as meaningfully accompanying the process each step of the way. And to Sophia Stanger of the Austrian Centre for Peace and Heloise Heyer & Hesta Groenewald of the PeaceNexus Foundation for their openness, curiosity, and of course, institution’s seed investments to lift this idea off the ground!

And thanks to all of your for your engagement and enthusiasm - you are what makes this community a special place to be.

My inbox is open for your questions, ideas, participatory budgeting links, etc. I look forward to connecting, and above all, I look forward to being back in touch in a few months to take a look back at these projects!

Warmly,

Annika