LifeMosaic

LifeMosaic, a UK-based organisation, supports communities and movements to protect their rights, cultures, and territories, and to determine their own futures.

LifeMosaic has a vision of an abundant future where empowered communities maintain the mosaic of biological and cultural diversity. In its movement building work, staff provide local level training, creative toolkits and films to empower Indigenous Peoples to organise to defend their rights, lands and cultures.

Critical aspects of LifeMosaic’s work involve empowering youth Indigenous leaders and supporting communities to develop a ‘Plan de Vida’. A Plan de Vida is a powerful indigenous approach for self-determined development that has been adopted by communities across the world including in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and Scotland.

Indigenous Peoples, and their cultures and knowledge systems, are under threat from land grabs, displacement and discriminatory policies. Indigenous Peoples also maintain a large proportion of global biological and cultural diversity and are guardians of systems and practices that offer pathways out of the world’s environmental crises to a resilient, abundant future.

Indigenous Peoples are defending vast areas of the planet in the face of adversity and are putting into practice traditional and innovative ways to protect their territories, revitalise commons, rewild nature and reconnect communities.

Synchronicity Earth’s Biocultural Diversity Programme provides core programme support to LifeMosaic, supporting staff to work with groups such as the Shawi and Wampis of the Peruvian Amazon and the Mandobo and Awyu of Indonesian Papua.

The Shawi and Wampis territories cover around seven million hectares of primary rainforest and LifeMosaic is supporting these communities to enforce customary laws and strengthen their negotiating position with the government.

In the Papua province in Indonesia, LifeMosaic is supporting the Mandobo and Awyu to exercise Free Prior and Informed Consent, and to take action to defend their territories, cultures and forests from planned Tana Merah plantations (the largest oil palm plantations in the world).