The Kosisi village in the Ysabel Province, Solomon Islands developed over the past year community-based protocols to maintain biolcultural systems, enabled food security and supported gendered ways of knowing. Following many similar successes over the past year, Snowchange opens second year of Oceans-Wide Relief in the Pacific.
Bio-cultural aspect of Kosisi villagers in the Solomon Islands has been deprived from the environmental destruction caused by logging that impacts food security and gender ways in the community.
The logging operation destroys the gardens, pollutes the water and contaminates the marine ecosystem in Kosisi village. This creates burden to men, women, girls and boys to fetch food and water further away from the village. Their daily livelihoods have now resort to gardening on new lands quite far from the village.
Using Oceans-Wide Relief grant, the village reflected on the issues faced and strategies identified to improve the ‘Thautabu’ cultural practice. This enabled a roadmap, actions and support to the village to plan and respond to these challenges.
See a participatory video developed by the community here.
All in all the 2021-22 support programme enabled community-led responses and actions across the Arctic coasts in Greenland, Siberia, Finland and Norway, Aleuts, Chile, Aoteoroa, Taiwan and many other locations.
For the 2022-2023 season, Snowchange opens the next call of support for the Arctic and Pacific Indigenous communities.
Indigenous and local communities in the Pacific and Arctic are eligible to apply. The guiding principles of the small grants programme will aim to
- Restore the collective coastal lands and access and resource rights where applicable
- Support community-based protocols for maintaining biocultural systems, food security and gendered ways of knowing the Pacific
- Support the sharing-gifting traditions of the region
- Support inter-community cohesion and exchanges
- Restore and directly reserve a portion of the small grants to support revitalization of traditional navigation and Starlore of the Pacific peoples
- Proliferation of technology and solutions to make Indigenous governance and coastal tenure more visible
- Implementation of Indigenous/tribal rights through traditional institutions
Knowledge holder from Kosisi.
Ultimately the grants are however assessed as articulated by the community needs.
Grants will be available for 2022-23 as long as funds remain.
We accept applications on a rolling basis.
In order to apply, please send one page free form application, which includes contact information, rationale, and grant use proposal to
