Mission: Save Our Spirits, SOS, is a fund established to support traditional communities to preserve and protect their sacred environments, cultures, spiritual teachings, practices, and wisdom.
Diverse native peoples have been here for millennia, sharing the landscape with a world full of diverse life. SOS seeks to support traditional communities who continue to live on and traverse these landscapes and who use their traditional knowledge of the land, waters, climate, flora and fauna to maintain spiritual balance and ensure cultural and environmental continuity and sustainability for themselves, others, and the future.
SOS provides grants to traditional communities in support of projects to:
- Protect Nature: mountains, forests, deserts, rivers, lakes, the oceans, the air, the soils and all plants and animals. All are interconnected living entities and home to the Spirits that are to be respected and nourished. To this end, we support projects that use ceremonies, ritual, and traditional knowledge that are founded on a reverence for life and encourage the well-being of people, animals, plants, Spirits, the Earth, and the Cosmos. These principles are often called ‘deep ecology’.
- Sustain and share the traditional knowledge, teachings and spiritual practices of their shamans, elders, and wisdom keepers to preserve and enhance their spiritual practices and traditional values and ways of living in harmony and balance with water, fire, air and earth. This includes practices and beliefs that are understood through vision and prophesy.
SOS seeks to support projects that align with its mission. Priority is given to initiatives in the following areas:
- Ceremony, ritual, and related meetings and gatherings that need or should be done as the world transitions
- Meetings and gatherings to restore balance in the land, in traditional communities, and between Nature and communities
- Environmental restoration and conservation projects in accordance with the principles of deep ecology
- Promotion of transboundary indigenous and conservation collaboration
- Emergency support of urgent conservation and community issues
- Responses to long-term threats from industrial and resource development
- Intergenerational transmission of traditional spiritual knowledge to future generations and the wider community
- Traditional lifeways, spiritual practices and culture including subsistence herding and farming
- Experiential education and outreach
- Limited general funding for community leaders, organizations, advocacy and community organizing in the above areas
Please note: Save Our Spirits does not generally support technology purchases, general public festivals and events, or direct legal or law enforcement work. It focuses on animistic beliefs and shamanic practices over other spiritual belief systems and practices.
To apply for a grant from the SOS Fund:
Please send us a letter of inquiry with one to two-page description of your project as an attachment to an email, or by mail. We will send you a reply and let you know if we have any questions and if you are invited to submit a more complete proposal. Project descriptions and proposals are accepted and reviewed on a continual basis. Grant awards for 2020 generally range from US$5,000 to US$10,000.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Save Our Spirits is a project within EarthAction, a non-profit educational and charitable US based organization.
Please send your letter of inquiry and a one to two-page proposal to:
Lois Barber, Advisor, Save Our Spirits,
c/o EarthAction
Mail: PO Box 63, Amherst, MA, 01004 USA
Email: [email protected],
Tel: +1 413 427-8827
Support for SOS Projects is made possible from the SOS Fund of the Whatcom Community Foundation based in Bellingham, Washington in the USA.
