Participants and facilitators during a FIRE training in Brazzaville. Credit: Tenure Facility.
👉 Lisez en français
“Finance” might bring technical jargon and spreadsheets to mind, but it’s so much more than that. Through our work with The International Land and Forest Tenure Facility’s grantee partners from Indigenous and Local Communities around the world, we’re more convinced than ever that it can be a strong, steady heartbeat supporting rights and justice.
From 2023 to 2026, Spring’s Financial Innovation and Resilience (FIRE) program worked with close to 150 Indigenous and Local Community leaders to facilitate knowledge exchanges and strengthen capacities in areas of transactional, managerial and strategic finance.
We came on board after partners expressed an interest in learning “conventional” finance, because funding requires clear, stable financial systems and securing territorial rights requires significant financial resources.
Indigenous Peoples have safeguarded lands, waters, and biodiversity for generations and are at the forefront of environmental stewards. Yet, according to the World Resources Institute, less than 1% of global climate funding reaches programs that support Indigenous and community land tenure and management, and only a fraction of that went directly to community-led organizations.
The FIRE program’s goal? Support Indigenous and Local Community leaders to leverage their strengths, integrate new capacities and find the power to change how resources flow into their organizations and movements.
It was incredibly meaningful to convene organizations representing communities whose territories form part of 15 countries. We met in person in Belize, Colombia, India, Kenya, Nepal and the Republic of the Congo, followed by online meetings.
The participating leaders practiced new skills, reflected with peers, and developed “FIRE Action Plans” for their work. Ultimately, they shifted mindsets and processes in their organizations. Facilitators and peers exchanged ways to deal with common challenges, such as in verifying invoices or receipts in remote communities, along with bank closures, cash shortages, delayed payments, and volatile exchange rates.
"This training has helped elevate our organization, bringing us to a national and international level,” said Romy Inengenta, Secretary General of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of Mokoto. “We learned many things, particularly about the financial ecosystem, focusing on three elements: people and relationships, management policy, and systems and tools.”
One of the most important things participants told us was that they appreciated how Spring’s global team (including Indigenous facilitators) themselves shared similar experiences. Building relationships with one another was a foundational part of the program.
It was interactive, experiential and focused on participants connecting and exchanging experiences. Breakout groups, role-plays for donor conversations and pitches, as well as exchanges during meals, allowed participants to share relatable real-world challenges and brainstorm creative solutions collectively.
“The breakout sessions were very enriching—sharing ideas and learning from other participants drawn from different organizations,” said one participant at the program’s conclusion.
FIRE provided an opportunity for both program and finance persons to sit together, reflect and exchange. It was also an opportunity for donors and partners to learn together. “Finance is for everyone,” was a key takeaway for supporting program teams to learn the basics of finance and support a teamwork-based approach to financial health.
"We stopped seeing finance as a 'back-office' function and started seeing it as the fuel for our frontline advocacy,” added another participant.
Finance is a tool for mission-critical decision-making. Spring’s FIRE toolbox supported participants to master the foundations of financial management and demystified important topics like governance, risk management, standard operating procedures and policies, audits, reserves, key financial indicators, donor procedures and resource mobilization communications.
“We learned a great deal about transactional finance, which is a branch of finance where we learned how to organize our accounting, financial management, and cash management, as well as how to produce our reports,” added Espérance, the National Coordinator of the Union for the Emancipation of Indigenous Women. “And in terms of managerial finance, we learned how to plan, how to implement sound policies, systems, and tools to guide the effective management of our finances.”
Learn more about what Indigenous and Local Community leaders are saying about their participation in FIRE—with thanks to our partner Afrique Environnement Plus for their French reportage in the Republic of Congo and to the Tenure Facility for their blogs covering the trainings in Bogotá and Brazzaville.
Participants during a FIRE training in Brazzaville. Credit: Tenure Facility.
Ultimately, the FIRE experience is about agency.
When organizations step into their power and get strategic about financial resilience and innovation, they can clearly see what aligns with their mission… and also what doesn’t.
They gain the freedom to say "no" to funding that comes with too many strings attached or steers them off mission, and they can boldly ask for the resources they need (like core mission support) to fuel the long-term work of rights and sovereignty for Indigenous and Local Communities.
That agency is already taking shape: since the training, at least two Indigenous organizations from the latest Francophone cohort for the first time secured institutional support, which will allow them to manage those resources on their own terms.
🔥