Our friends and funders at The Pollination Project thought we were doing a good job with the money they gave us, so they selected us from hundreds of grantees to be featured on their top 10 impact stories of 2013.
We are thrilled to be featured alongside this community of effective global changemakers!
This acknowledgment comes with an end-of-year bonus reward that will provide finances for the establishment of a land reserve, aiming to achieve the following goals:
1) Provide a space to cultivate and multiply endangered herbs, plants, trees, and other crops indigenous to Amuru’s threatened forests and grasslands.
2) Obtain a land title for this land to make it a legal nightmare for sugarcane and oil corporations to steal the land through the legal process (which has been used to take advantage of local residents in the recent past).
3) Provide some space for volunteers to grow a surplus of crops to be sold at local markets where South Sudanese residents and other local residents come to purchase foods grown in Northern Uganda. These profits will help sustain the land reserve financially.
4) Allow the most vulnerable (widows, orphans, elderly, the sick, etc) to glean at designated parts of the reserve.
5) Community leaders have stressed that the effective use of land sends a message to encroachers that the land is being used and is not available for mass commercial interests, so developing sustainable agriculture is in itself a nonviolent method of resisting the land grabbing common in Amuru.
If we are trying to prevent mass land theft, trying to prevent displacement and environmental disasters….we must also proclaim what we DO want: a thriving agricultural region in which humans and their environment coexist in mutually beneficial relationship!