Funded Projects

Wuru Taino Tekiro’uo’s Taino Language & Culture Revitalization and Preservation

Wuru Taino Tekiro’uo is a grassroots initiative dedicated to the revitalization and celebration of Taino language, culture, and identity. Our mission is to create decolonial spaces for learning, healing, and reconnection—offering community-driven presentations, workshops, ceremonies, gatherings, and educational courses that center Taino voices and experiences.

We envision a future where Taino people—of all ages and walks of life—can reclaim their heritage, find empowerment through cultural knowledge, and strengthen community bonds. To support this vision, we offer Hiwatahia-Taino language classes, history courses, poetry workshops, and a Hiwatahia-Taino language conversation practice group, ensuring accessibility and inclusion. We also host a Kiwari (Queer/ LGBT2s) Taino panel discussion in June, in celebration of pride month.

Mujeres del Sur

Our project, Mujeres del Sur, envisions a world where Indigenous women lead the restoration and protection of their ancestral lands through culturally grounded, community-led solutions. Rooted in the Urus Indigenous territory in Oruro, Bolivia, our mission is to empower women to reclaim their knowledge, identity, and power while addressing environmental degradation and social injustices.

We are an intergenerational group of Indigenous women who have come together to restore our wetlands, protect water sources, and build climate resilience through the revitalization of traditional ecological knowledge and gender-just organizing. Through workshops, clean-up brigades, art-based storytelling, and collaboration with Indigenous youth, our work centers on intersectionality, healing, and decolonization.

As a grassroots, non-profit Indigenous-led initiative, we prioritize inclusive participation from women, gender-diverse individuals, and marginalized communities. We actively fight against extractivism, gender-based violence, and cultural erasure, while advocating for systems rooted in care, reciprocity, and environmental justice.

Water Protection Youth Network of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta

The Water Protection Youth Network of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a local model called to become a global network. This is a proposal to strengthen environmental, ancestral, and citizen education, empowering youth to lead community processes to protect bodies of water, the land’s arteries that make life sustainable.

This is within the framework of Legislative Decree 1500 Línea Negra, which protects and safeguards the ancestral knowledge of the indigenous peoples of the Sierra and also protects sacred places of vital spiritual and ecological importance, such as the rivers that are born in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. This territory of unique relevance is the world’s highest coastal mountain and encompasses five different climate zones. Its protection results from the historic struggle of the Kogui, Wiwa, Arhuaco, and Kankuamo peoples, who have fought with their lives for the recognition and respect of the land and their ancestral territories.

Through this project, we will contribute to global climate resiliency and ancestral sovereignty. This will be possible by promoting the protection of 10 essential rivers in the territory and empowering their communities in the search for social and environmental justice through a comprehensive ecological approach.

VOLVER A LA TIERRA TOUR / Back To Earth Journey (Previously funded 2020)

Back to Earth is an artistic and innovative project showing the importance of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta [Santa Marta’s snow-capped mountain range], located in Colombia, through an animated short displayed as a 3D hologram, to bring the understanding of the ancestral peoples of the land to our children and youth.

Our heart’s wish is for the Back to Earth Tour to be an annual event, bringing young people the ways that allow us to preserve the territory’s ancestral wisdom. This will allow us to create, during a 10-day period, a space to bring to the present the ancestral tools motivating us to deeply connect with nature and life itself.

STONO (Previously funded 2022)

STONO is a concert-ritual exploring the 1739 Stono slave rebellion through the voices of its beyond-human participants: ancestors, water, mushrooms, guns, drums, the Kongolese Virgin Mary, and more. Rejecting the prevailing notion that Stono was a “failed” insurrection, this piece speculatively proposes outcomes that redefine success in ways that exceed racial politics and human temporality. Through songs, movement, and guided audience participation, STONO queers history to illuminate voices and strategies left out of written accounts. The show creates space to practice listening to and speaking with beyond-human entities, cultivating our capacity to learn from the greater worlds we sit within. Drawing on this wisdom, STONO is meant to inspire revolutionary action grounded in attention to physical and metaphysical concerns.

The Food Clinic

Remedy Studios is a young media production social enterprise founded by medical doctor and filmmaker Yemisi Bokinni. We are dedicated to creating life science entertainment that reaches and reflects diverse audiences. We are founded on the core objective of making meaningful progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and 13 (Climate Action) among our target audiences of communities of colour.

STONO

STONO is an interspecies performance in which participants are guided to explore the 1739 Stono Slave Rebellion through the voices of its beyond-human participants. This piece–and its accompanying educational modules–will animate radical Black histories in the Americas and offer a space for humans to better connect with the natural and spiritual entities that share our world.

Areito: Taino Voices

“Areito: Taino Voices” is an Indigenous virtual monthly gathering that features two different invited Taino guest speakers each month ranging from artists, activists, teachers, academics, etc. It is organized and hosted by artist and activist Ra Ruiz Leon (Taino-Borikua) and educator Gladys Yacely Aponte (Taino-Kiskeya). Taino people are one of several Indigenous groups in the Caribbean and have been resisting colonization since 1492 when Europeans arrived on our shores. Ra and Yacely began this virtual gathering in January of 2021 as a way for the Taino community to stay connected. Today Taino people live and work all over the world but remain connected to their ancestral homelands in the Caribbean (Cuba, Boriken aka Puerto Rico, Ayiti aka Haiti, Kiskeya aka Dominican Republic, Xamaica aka Jamaica, Bahamas). Areito is our word for ceremony and it is one of the ways that we maintain our culture alive and seek harmony with our mother earth. Our virtual Areito gives Taino people an opportunity to hear about other Taino people who are doing amazing work, and a way to stay connected to one another even in the face of a pandemic and/or distance. It is also an opportunity for Indigenous Caribbean folks who are looking to reconnect to their Indigeneity to learn new things and find community. For a year and a half this event has ran monthly without any funds. It is all volunteer work done with a lot of love and passion, however it has been a big goal to secure funds to be able to compensate all involved for their time, energy, and expertise. The community that tunes in each month has grown, proving that it holds a special place in many peoples hearts because they can stay connected to their culture and community through this virtual space and time. At the end of our gatherings we play a game called Taino Trivia, where we ask a question related to our session and the first person to get the answer correctly wins a gift. It can range from a Taino sticker to Taino jewelry, all made by Taino artists. We seek to support and uplift our people as much as we can.

TERRA BOMBA

Our mission is to promote community awareness about urban gardening, medicinal plants, & terrariums; to simply bring back greenery in our modern society. We strive to create alternative methods of planting / growing medicinal & ornamental plants, and remind people that there are many simple ways to grow plants in today’s urban life.

Imperfect Eco-Hero Podcast

Through the power of storytelling, the Imperfect Eco-Hero Podcast, based in Toronto, will connect and celebrate eco-heroes across the globe fighting the climate crisis, presenting stories that inspire and deepen our understanding and respect for the planet.

Let’s Go Green Together (Butterfly Class)

Let’s Go Green Together! is a new kindergarten class that will engage children, parents, and the community in nature and empower them to adopt new habits, reducing waste and pollution.