As we launch our Strategic Climate Fund campaign, we wanted to highlight our five Strategic Climate Fund Partner organisations and the urgent work they’re doing to take action on the climate crisis. Each of these organisations work on projects that will have a positive impact within the 2030 timeframe.

The Agroecology Fund supports just and sustainable food systems. Such systems promote the wellbeing and human rights of small farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and their communities, replenish soil and water resources, and help mitigate climate change.

Using a unique participatory philanthropic model, the Agroecology Fund links practitioners, scientists, and movement builders working across the globe with the necessary resources to help them transform our global food systems.

Since four funding donors launched the Agroecology Fund in January 2012, the organisation has grown rapidly. Today, the donor community includes over 40 active funders committed to advancing agroecology while leveraging even more outside funding to support agroecology movements worldwide.

The Agroecology Fund is guided by four strategic directions:

• Money: Shift and leverage significant financial resources towards agroecology.

• Policy: Strengthen political and economic systems to enable agroecology to thrive.

• Learning: Co-create and share agroecology knowledge and practices.

• Communication: Influence the global conversation about solutions to global hunger and climate change by amplifying agroecological solutions.

The Agroecology Fund aims to strengthen agroecology movements around the world. Agroecology movements are made up of allied organisations advocating for equitable and sustainable food systems and resisting policies, institutions and vested interests that undermine them. Agroecology movements organise constituencies, conduct real-time field research, construct “new economy” food systems, and apply political pressure to win agroecology-friendly public policies and programmes.

Strategies are as diverse as researching soil carbon sequestration, creating agroecology schools and seed banks, offering new models of agricultural extension, passing local land and water use ordinances, and critically, resisting systematic barriers to agroecology, such as corporate control of seed systems. The Agroecology Fund applies its pooled resources to the intersection of these movements, where farmers, consumers, scientists, policy-makers, and environmentalists collaborate.

Since its foundation, the Agroecology Fund has awarded grants to organisations in 88 countries. In 2021 and 2022, regional funds were created in Mexico’s Peninsula of Yucatan and India, and regional funds for Western and Eastern Africa are currently in development.

While there is much discussion of local efforts to transform food systems, in practice very little funding actually reaches these territorial-level organisations and networks. The intention behind the Agroecology Fund’s regional funds is to be able to make sure that funding is extended broadly and deeply within complex ecosystems, cultures and political systems. 

The Agroecology Fund says: “The Agroecology Fund is thrilled to partner with GCC to strengthen healthy and just food systems grounded in agroecology. To transform industrial food systems that have hurt both people and the planet, we need to steer resources into the hands of grassroots organisations and networks leading agroecology movements. Thank you GCC for the opportunity to work together to support courageous food systems changemakers around the world.”