Ayni, Regenerative Food Forest in the Amazon

Dear friends and supporters,

We hope this report from the field finds you well. Since we last wrote to you, we have continued our agroforestry outreach work with Amazonian families and communities.

Our team organized two field visits during the last three months to the Kukama communities in the Marañon to follow up the agroforestry plots of the Kukama women and their families. In addition to supervising the plots, we also provided technical assistance on beekeeping and honey production with Amazonian stingless bees. This topic always generates extra interest, and upon request, we supported several families with expertise and some prefabricated wood boxes for the beehives.

Earlier this year we were approached by the representative regional indigenous organization, ORPIO, with whom we´ve been sporadically collaborating throughout the years, to offer training to ten indigenous representatives from remote communities in the Peru-Brazil border region. In late June, we provided a week-long training on sustainable productive activities which strengthen food sovereignty. Always using as starting point the generally rich forest farming and management knowledge indigenous peoples hold, we offered the participants a deeper look into viable alternatives for food sovereignty and income generation for indigenous communities, with a specific focus on family agroforestry and native beekeeping.

Since the foundation of our organization, we´ve always had a special relationship with the communities that surround our Permaculture Center, whom we´ve been supporting in different ways throughout the years. Over the last couple of years, we´ve continued to support the most dedicated participants, a group of roughly 20 families, in their agroforestry endeavors. Earlier this year we´ve organized several one-day training courses, which continued into the period of this report. In addition, we´ve organized two learning visits for these families to our allies around Iquitos. In august we visited a farm specialized in citrus fruits, which many families integrate into their agroforestry system. In September, we invited the villagers to visit the impressive plant nursery and family farm of Pedro - a close friend and collaborator of Chaikuni - which produces an abundance of different fruit varieties within integral Amazonian agroforestry systems.

These visits were inspiring, not only for the villagers who already started to apply much of the learned lessons in their own plots, but also for us at Chaikuni. Some of the learnings helped strengthen our own work with our plant nursery, which has grown a lot over the last few months, with the intention to keep providing seedlings and plants to our allies and their family farms.

Finally, we´d like to transmit the gratitude from our team and our allies for your continued support, without which we cannot do what we do. We will also be honest with you: to be able to continue our outreach work and respond to the increasing requests from the communities, we need to step up our fundraising. We will put a lot of energy into the upcoming Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign on GlobalGiving, on November 28^th, and hope that you can help us spread the word. If you are in a position to donate or know someone who can, please do so. We are immensely grateful for any kind of support.

Warm regards from the Peruvian Amazon,

The Chaikuni Team

Dear friends and supporters,

The rainy season is coming to an end in the Peruvian Amazon. The rivers recede and expose fresh fertile soils. Very much excited, we began a new stage of our work with indigenous communities, in particular indigenous women, to recover and promote sustainable production systems and agricultural practices.

We initiated this work last year through a Permaculture and Agroforestry Course at our Permaculture Center with the participation of Kukama and Shawi representatives, and the installation of the first 2.7 hectares of diverse agroforestry plots (or chacras integrales) in indigenous communities. This year, we were able to intensify our partnership with the Kukama women from the Marañon River. At the end of February, we visited the Kukama communities of Nuevo San Juan, Shapajilla, Parinari and Tangarana, to present and formalize a new project, through which we will support approximately 20 families in the four communities to install their agroforestry plots, based on their ancestral forest farming knowledge.

The women themselves are the protagonists. Each village selected a woman to lead the work in their community; they are called the promotors, or las promotoras.In April we organized a one-week workshop for the four women and an additional young person from each village, in which they acquired deeper knowledge related to seed germination, organic fertilizers, grafting and design of the chacras, among others. This will allow them to lead the installation of plant nurseries in their communities, which will supply the future agroforestry plots. The promotoras are also the direct link between the families and our Institute. They will receive further training in the future and offer technical support to the families in the communities throughout the project.The chacras integrales will offer alternative income and improve food security for the participating families, all-the-while contributing to the regeneration of the Amazon, through regenerative agroforestry practices as opposed to harmful agriculture.

At the Chaikuni Institute we believe in the importance of sharing, exchanging and spreading knowledge. Over the last months we put our heads together and thought of new ways of how to improve our offer. This is how we came up with a new training course, which teaches “Traditional Knowledge for Self Sufficiency”. In this 12-day course, participants will develop skills and knowledge to design and implement regenerative projects in the tropics based on the indigenous concept of "Sumaq Kawsay", which promotes the idea that the collective well-being of the community is achieved through harmony within nature (learn more about the course).We welcome everyone to our course – the paying participants from around the world always create a possibility for local indigenous students to participate for free.

For us, each report is not only an opportunity to reflect on the work we have been doing and to celebrate our progress, but also to express our deepest gratitude for your continued support. You make our work possible.

With love from the Amazon,

The Chaikuni Institute Team