Protect an Acre of Rainforest in Ecuador

While our fundraising has been substantial in 2021, we are not even halfway to our goal of securing the $250,000 that the Ecuadorian counterpart of the Cofan Survival Fund needs to cover its core projects each year. We need more funds to maximize the effectiveness of the  “Rapid Response Team,” whose political and legal work from Quito to the farthest corners of Cofan territory is never-ending. We need more funds to give additional Cofan students the opportunity to get undergraduate and graduate degrees in Ecuador’s best universities. And we need more funds for our “smaller” projects: enrolling more Cofan families in Ecuador’s “Seguro Campesino” healthcare system, creating a new reserve in the Andean foothills near the town of Cuyuja, starting a program to ensure the effective transmission of cultural knowledge from elder Cofan women to young Cofan girls, and sustaining the success of our Charapa Project, which has brought endangered river turtles back from the brink of local extinction while providing income to impoverished Cofan households. Finally, our long-term dream is to revive the Cofan Park Guard Program, which at one point had 50 Cofan rangers patrolling the entirety of Cofan territory to stop the illegal activities of miners, loggers, and other forest destroyers. Unfortunately, the money simply isn’t there. One day, we believe the world will pay Indigenous Peoples the money they deserve--and need--for their time-, energy-, and resource-consuming work to maintain the ecosystems on which our planet’s health depends. But we’re not there yet. Until that day arrives, people like me and you need to help the Cofan as much as we can.

In addition to the important work on the ground of Cofan Park Guards, there is much structural and political work that needs to be done to secure the rights of Cofanes to protect their terriotory. Freddy Espinosa, is an Ecuadorian citizen who has worked for the CSF since it was founded. As a motorcycle-driving “pizza delivery boy,” Freddy met our executive director Randy Borman when Freddy was still a very young man. Slowly, he learned to help Randy negotiate the ins and outs of Ecuador's capital city to make our legal and political work possible. As a native Quiteño (Quito resident), Freddy’s Spanish is flawless, and he knows just how to relate to Ecuador’s elected leaders and bureaucrats to convince them that the Cofan are the right people to protect the country’s most biodiverse landscapes. After many years with us, and after finishing his university degree, Freddy became our main legal coordinator. Without Freddy’s help, so many of the Cofan Nation’s land rights, territorial treaties, and mechanisms for securing governmental and nongovernmental support—financial and otherwise—would not exist.