Siemenpuu supports civil society organisations in the Global South by providing funding with which the supported actors can carry out their own initiatives, planned and implemented locally. Support is targeted at social movements and community-level action groups that promote environmental justice, ecological democracy, and human rights.
The most important, cross-cutting principles that guide all of Siemenpuu’s work are equality, the indivisibility of human rights, and the enabling of systems-level changes. Siemenpuu promotes notably the rights of women, local communities, and indigenous peoples, and intervenes in various forms of multiple discrimination.
OUR VISION: We strive for a world in which biodiversity loss and climate change have been halted to a sustainable level, while at the same time good life is brought within everyone’s reach by ecosocially sustainable ways of life and livelihoods.
Siemenpuu works on the following, interlacing thematic entities that are crucial in enabling sufficient and ecologically sustainable livelihoods globally, and in which Siemenpuu possesses a long-standing experience:
- Biocultural Rights: Strengthening of indigenous and local communities’ biocultural diversity by advancing the implementation of internationally acknowledged traditional rights;
- Energy Justice: Consolidating sustainable energy systems serving local, rural communities by advancing multivoiced energy planning and community-based energy production;
- Feminist Agroecology and Community Forests: Strengthening the rights of local communities dependent on forests and small-scale farming, improving their livelihoods, and protecting biodiversity.
The activities under each theme are guided by five cross-cutting objectives:
- Strengthening biodiversity;
- Enforcing climate justice;
- Advancing system-level changes (a just transition into ecological democracy);
- Fostering equality and human rights-based approaches;
- Reinforcing civil society
Geographically, Siemenpuu’s support is primarily channelled to the so-called least developed countries (LDCs). Most of Siemenpuu’s activities take place in areas where previous projects have led to good results and where Siemenpuu possesses strong country-specific knowledge and extensive networks of connections.
Siemenpuu supports the cooperation and networking of social movements on the local as well as the global level. The foundation engages in long-term cooperation with Southern partners and promotes the strengthening of its partners’ own capacities and mutual learning. Among the foundation’s objectives is also to increase equal interaction between the Global South and the Global North.
OUR MISSION: We support the work of civil society movements in the Global South advocating for sustainable lifestyles, environmental justice, and local communities’ rights. Support is provided in the form of funding as well as other types of assistance. We engage in communication and advocacy work especially in Finland in order to live out the movements’ visions.
Siemenpuu passes on its accumulated learnings as well as the messages of the environmental justice movement, the environmental defenders, and the low-consuming cultures and local communities of the Global South notably within Finland, in order to feed the Finnish debate, but also internationally according to possibilities. Siemenpuu’s aim is to increase the Finnish population’s understanding of global affairs as well as their activity on behalf of global environmental justice. Siemenpuu’s communications are guided by a separate and more detailed Communications Strategy 2022–2025.
Our objectives:
- Strengthened cooperation and networking among social movements engaged in promoting environmental justice;
- Empowerment and consolidation of local communities;
- Duty-bearers work actively for environmental justice, and initiatives putting environmental justice into practice have advanced;
- Local communities have succeeded in defending their areas within sustainable communal use and community conservation, and more areas have been acquired;
- Increased biodiversity in forests and agricultural environments;
- More active engagement among the Finnish population in promoting global justice and ecological democracy.