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Fondo Socioambiental Plurales: boosting collective power

Do you know the work of Fondo Socioambiental Plurales (Plurales Socio-Environmental Fund), our member organization from Argentina? We interviewed Marta Esber and Verónica Luna, from the program team, and they shared with us the history of Plurales, their main areas of work and strategies to tackle challenges. For more information, visit Plurales’ website.

Fondo Socioambiental Plurales

Can you tell us a brief history of Plurales?

Our organization laid its foundations in 2001. The social, political and economic crisis in Argentina urged us to develop projects, take action, and build networks and alliances in order to ensure access to economic, political, social and environmental rights in the country and the region. In 2006 we became Fundación Plurales.

We are based in Córdoba, Argentina, and provide technical-political support, from a feminist perspective to women’s or mixed organizations led by women, farmworkers, indigenous people, and peri-urban sectors in different ecoregions such as Chaco, Puna, and wetlands, in Argentina and Latin America We work in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay.

In 2024, we became the Fondo Socioambiental Plurales (Plurales Socio-Environmental Fund). This decision was also related to an alarming context of crisis that prompted us to design new strategies. We aim to support and strengthen rural and indigenous grassroots organizations through concrete tools and solutions to promote collective power from the territories themselves. These are organizations and/or groups that do not “fit” into the financing profiles, which tend to be so restricted.

For this reason, we are now a socio-environmental fund, and we are part of the Socio-Environmental Funds of the Global South (Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur). The Alliance brings together long-standing organizations such as Fundo Casa Socioambiental in Brazil, Fondo Acción Solidaria in Mexico, Fundación Tierra Viva in Central America, Samdhana Institute in Southeast Asia, Fundación Semilla in Bolivia, Fondo Socioambiental Peru, Emerger Fondo Socioambiental in Colombia, Red de Comunidades Rurales in Argentina, Fondo Ñeque in Ecuador and Fundo Tindzila in Mozambique.

What are the organization’s main areas of work?

Plurales is a non-profit organization whose vision is to contribute to the consolidation of “democratic communities” by incorporating environmental and gender justice as pillars, reinforcing respect for diversity, equity and solidarity. Hence, we envision communities where each human being is a free and responsible protagonist, a co-actor of collective creations within the framework of sustainable human development.

In this sense, our organization aims to create and strengthen spaces and work teams to:

✔ Generate conditions, reflections and actions that contribute to promoting access to socio-environmental rights for people, their organizations and communities.
✔ Promote gender justice in all its dimensions favoring equity in society by implementing projects and strategies for intervention or communication.
✔ Use different dimensions of culture and education to support alternatives for transformation.
✔ Strengthen collective action, favoring a critical, supportive and global understanding of problems.
✔ Promote exchange and cooperation among people, communities, regions, provinces, both nation and worldwide, especially in the global south.

To achieve these objectives, our current areas of work are:

  • The promotion of environmental and gender justice. Considering that environmental justice cannot be achieved without gender justice, we work to ensure respect for women’s rights, including their access to and control over natural resources, applying a crosscutting feminist approach. We work together with the Feminist School for Climate Action (EFAC) and the Feminist Land Platform (FLP) to achieve this. We also work towards supporting communities and organizations with access to communication tools for advocacy, helping them amplify their voices in defense of territories. This is carried out through projects like the documentary Litio, the micro documentary Guardianas del Territorio, and the podcasts Después del Fuego and Hablemos del Campo, among others.
  • The socio-environmental support fund for the direct and flexible allocation of funds that strengthen the capacities of organizations and communities for making decisions autonomously and carrying out actions based on their practices according to their specific contexts. This is achieved in three lines of funding: support for environmental activists and defenders in advocacy; promotion of fair climate solutions with a gender perspective; and urgent funds for activists.
  • The promotion of the collective power of communities and organizations led by activists and environmental defenders by developing better capacities for advocacy at national, regional and global scales. In this area we work together with ENI Argentina, Tierra y ODS and the Environmental Defenders Platform.

What are the main challenges Plurales faces and how do you resist and organize?

We face multiple challenges in a global scenario of dispute between the interests of the extractive economic model and the struggle of peoples to sustain life by preserving the nature. Throughout the world, natural resources are concentrated in the power of large economic groups. In Argentina, as in other places, we also find ourselves facing an adverse political environment characterized by a far-right government and public policies.

Local marginalized communities, face high vulnerability and criminalization. In addition to that, in a patriarchal culture women often play subordinate roles, which makes it difficult for them to fully participate in public life. In this context, we work to strengthen communities’ resilience in their struggle for justice and sustainability.

The main challenge we currently face is to expand work strategies, focusing all our actions on directly accompanying local communities and organizations in their efforts to defend and protect people and the ecosystem where they live.

Thus, we resist by promoting the collective power of communities and organizations led by activists and environmental defenders by developing better capacities for advocacy at the national, regional and global levels.

We have more than 20 years of territorial work and we know that in many cases, interventions through the system of projects and programs are not enough to respond to the demands and needs for advocating and strengthening local, rural and indigenous communities and organizations.

Development aid and international cooperation projects impose very rigid institutional frameworks that are alien to the realities of territorial organizations and communities. This is aggravated by the complex contexts of local communities, who are the first to suffer from natural disasters, the impact of the climate crisis and the violation of rights.

That is why we are working on the direct and flexible allocation of funds that strengthen the capacities of local communities so that they can make decisions autonomously and carry out actions based on their practices and knowledge, adapted to their specific contexts.

Through the areas of work mentioned above, we seek to face these challenges and promote environmental and gender justice under a feminist approach.

How does the Feminist Land Platform contribute to Plurales’ work?

It is very important for Plurales to belong to a global network, mainly of women organizations, promoting a local and regional perspective and seeking to have a bottom-up impact. This enables us to work with and make visible not only the problems, but also all the potentialities that are interwoven with other organizations.

Networking, collective strategy and exchange with other members for political advocacy at different levels are among the valuable contributions of the Platform to our work.

Being a constituent part of this political space also allows us to visualize our actions with the perspective of the global south, sharing our learnings and learning from our colleagues.

Together with the other organizations that make up the FLP, we exchange strategies, actions, agendas, alliances and collective experiences with a feminist perspective to expand women’s rights to land and territories and guarantee environmental sustainability and decent living conditions.

Our reason for existing coincides with that of the Platform, making it an important strategic space to build alliances and address oppressive practices and social norms towards a more just and egalitarian society.

The social, political and economic context of our territories is alarming and violent. However, we know one thing for sure: the answer always lies in committing to collective work, with the firm conviction that other worlds are possible.

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