FUNDING & assistance
2023-2024

We welcome LETTERS OF INTEREST from grassroots, member-based organizations, and their civil society partners, if present, who are seeking funding and support for projects related to Agroecology

Sub themes

• Climate action and adaptation
• Women's alliances and leadership
• Markets for agroecology
• Peer-to-peer networking and knowledge exchange

Grant Amounts: between $5000 to $15,000 USD.

Technical Assistance:  Our field team is made up of experienced social scientists/agroecological farmers who bring a breadth and depth of skills and exprience to support your agroecological transition. We come alongside to work with your knowledge and expertise and together identify what services best fit your goals.

Some examples of our support:

Market Localization
We'll explore the benefits and process of visioning and creating markets as realms of "thick ties", based in solidarity and circularity, and work together to amplify the role they play in greater social and ecological sustainability.

Narrative Framing
We all use stories and narratives to make sense of our worlds, as well as to imagine and create alternatives for what may yet be to come. Our work together involves creating "value webs," a participatory activity and tool to help reclaim, revitalize, and innovate with food stories embedded in community and place.

Documentary and peer-to peer networking
We offer documentary video production as well as other means for supporting knowledge exchange and networking opportunities.

Community based participatory research

Send us an email introducing your project and we can start a conversation.

Our engagements can be targeted and brief or more involved.

Have a look at this example of IR's collaboration with Nari Jhuri, a Bangladesh grassroots member-based group of women entrepreneurs, and their partner CSO.

Nari Jhuri Agroecology and Enterprise

EXAMPLES OF OUR PARTNERSHIPS AND WORK IN OCEANIA AND SOUTH ASIA

Backing women's alliances and leadership in biocultural resilience

Co-creating knowledge

Supporting environmental leaders in conservation management plans, climate adaptation, and resilient livelihoods

Amplifying integrative value-webs and agroecology practices to bolster food sovereignty

About our approach

As a small, independent operating foundation run by social scientists, we are acutely aware that most development and conservation funding remains a top-down, bureaucratic and colonizing force. Too often, NGOs engagements are modeled as "interventions" that overtake local agency, put forth distorted notions of accountability, and fail to establish equity and sustainability.

The perspective and practices of allyship help inform IR's approach. The concept of allyship refers to an active, consistent commitment to equity and to unlearning and re-evaluating positions of power and privilege in order to operate in solidarity with marginalized groups. It involves building trusting relationships, listening and reflecting critically on how ideas and frameworks do, or do not, advance equity and contribute to local sovereignty, alongside prioritizing community-defined goals and ways to measure and define evidence of change and success.

We recognize that there are many different ways of knowing and being. Knowledge co-creation is characterized by the idea of collective generation of new knowledge drawn from a plurality of existing knowledge: scientific, traditional, Indigenous, farmers', and women's, to name a few.

While we have unique skill sets and resources to offer, we also come to learn, and to work with our partners to pursue socially and ecologically accountable pathways forward.

Given these guiding principles, we approach this process as a type of "co-application" in which we may develop project proposals for IR funding together through a series of conversations that identify ways we can assist our partners most effectively and creatively in achieving their goals.