Dear Friend,
It has been 18 years since Burma’s first environmental and human rights organization, Green November 32, received its first external funding. This funding came from Global Greengrants Fund, and was the very first grant Greengrants made. The grant was an incredible boost for a struggling organization based in the war-torn borderlands of one of the world’s least developed countries. The grant empowered us to meet, discuss, organize and disseminate information locally on environmental issues. Since the time of that first grant, environmental and human rights organizations have spread throughout Burma. Greengrants has also spread — making thousands of grants like that first one, giving rise to new organizations and strengthened social movements around the world.
Greengrants’ grant to us helped jumpstart our work campaigning on environmental and human rights issues along the border of Burma and Thailand. We interviewed women and men forced into slave labor carrying supplies for the Burmese troops and wrote the first reports on the Thai-Burma gas pipeline and dam projects. We also disseminated materials on sustainable agriculture. We were ultimately successful in introducing environmental issues onto the Burmese political agenda. More importantly, the ideas planted by this work led to the sprouting of a number of indigenous environmental groups and networks. There are now numerous non-governmental and civil society groups that exist to express the voices of the development – and war – impacted peoples in Burma. While these groups face new challenges, including tighter restrictions and resources being divided too many ways, they reflect the remarkable growth of ecological awareness in Burma and a healthy environmental movement that didn’t previously exist.
The success of Greengrants’ grant to Green November exemplifies the power of the small grant in enabling communities and precipitating social movements. The Burmese students who fled in 1988 to continue their struggle against the dictatorship used to say, “A tree falls in the forest, but the forest goes on forever.” One tree, given needed resources, can produce a million seeds from which a thousand trees may eventually flourish, allowing the forest to go on forever. That small grant, so long ago now, was water on the young tree that was Green November, ultimately giving seed to stronger forest.
Grants from Greengrants have had similar impacts on so many groups doing essential work on difficult issues. Eighteen years later, Greengrants continues to be a tremendous resource for environmental groups, and their leaders, around the world.
Sincerely,
Steve Green
Green November 32, Burma
1991