Village Earth Efficiency Indicators

Why should you donate to Village Earth? With all the different appeals you get from charities throughout the year and especially during the holiday season, it makes it difficult to choose how to make the most impact with your donation. Here's some reasons why we think you should choose Village Earth.

1. Rather than simply treating the symptoms of poverty and powerlessness, we engage in a long-term dialog with communities to reveal and transform the underlying, and often inter-generational causes poverty. For Pine Ridge that means helping Lakota families claim more control over their land base. In Peru that has meant helping to create a regional organization of indigenous Shipibo communities to unify their struggle against illegal logging and the contamination of their rivers.
   
   
2. Rather than focusing on problems impacting communities, we start with a community's long-term vision for the future. If communities only focus on "fixing" problems, they may not actually be transforming the underlying structural contradictions afflicting them. By first clarifying a long-term and shared vision for the future, communities are free to imagine an entirely different future and begin working to create it.
   
   
3. Village Earth is small and un-bureaucratic. This allows us to be responsive to the bottom-up and flexible to the ever-changing nature of a genuine community development process. Furthermore, our staff is committed to the people and communities they work with and relate to them as partners or allies rather than as experts or managers. This solidarity encourages honest communication and dialog necessary to determine what is working and what is not.
   
   
4. Because we are small and un-bureaucratic we are able to focus our energy on what's important - our mission. We use our resources efficiently. According to our most recent 990 Report to the IRS, our total income was $164,081. Over 87% of that income went directly to support projects, only 10% went to support administration of the organization, and only 4% on fundraising.
   
   Our fundraising efficiency for 2006 (total dollars raised / total dollars spend on fundraising) was also high at 92%. That means we spent only 8 cents for every dollar raised. (see graph below)
   
   
   
   
5. Because of what we have accomplished! In 2006 we:
   
   (Click on the links to see pictures and read more about each accomplishment.)
   

1. Village Earth’s Adopt-a-Buffalo program expanded with the release of 19 more buffalo onto Lakota lands, which too increased by 1800 and 320 acres, not to mention the dozens of off-spring from previously released herds. To-date this program has helped to restore the plains ecology through sustainable bison restoration— impacting over 7000 acres of reservation lands and returning an important cultural symbol to the Lakota.
   
   
2. Facilitated the first ever Indigenous Tribunal (regional gathering of indigenous leaders) in the Ucayali Region of the Peruvian Amazon.
   
   
3. Established a community center run by local women in Cobán, Guatemala. As well ten Mayan students received scholarships to continue studying, and the Guatemalan project coordinator attended Village Earth’s yearly training course Participatory Practices for Sustainable Development.
   
   
4. Helped form the Organization for the Defense and the Development of the Indigenous Peoples of the Peruvian Amazon (ODDPIAP) and get legal status so they can begin accessing much needed resources and start working for the people;

5. Expanded the women’s microfinance project in Purulia, India – more than doubling the amount of women participating to over 160 women! The women have stopped migrating to the city in search of work and now have economically-viable ventures within their own communities. These women’s micro-finance groups have also now formed Forest Protection Committees that work on creating eco-friendly livelihood strategies.
   
   

6. We supported a Shipibo women's craft cooperatives with funding from Aid to Artisans and by connecting them with international markets;
   

7. Trained Sri Lankan government officers to better engage local farmers in participatory practices as they work to empower local farmer organizations to take ownership over rural infrastructure maintenance in an effort to reduce poverty.
   
   

8. Supported a Shipibo leader, Limber Gomez, to attend Village Earth's training course in the states - which he then returned to Peru and replicated the course with community leaders and in local universities.
   
   
9. Helped launch the new Shipibo website: www.shipibonation.org
   so they can represent themselves and for ease of communication between the region and the world.
   
   
10. And using Geographic Positioning System (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, we have worked closely with several communities to teach them this technology, create maps, use satellite imagery to detect illegal deforestation and cattle ranching on indigenous lands, and assisted in the legal process of demarcating territorial borders.
    
    
11. Facilitated community-based film workshops for Zapara, Kicwa, and Bora communities along Peru's remote Rio Tigre.

If you would like to support the continuation of this work please contribute today!

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Village Earth
PO Box 797
Fort Collins, Co 80522

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