Sharing knowledge

The Earth Defenders Toolkit is a hub for sharing knowledge for the benefit of Indigenous and other marginalized communities worldwide, and the easiest way to do that is to join the conversation in the Forum. We welcome discussion on tools, stories of how communities have taken action, challenges in the field, and any other kind of insight. 

Helping earth defender communities

Are you an ally that would like to get involved and see how you can provide direct support for a community taking action to defend their territory? Check and see if there are any active help requests in the Earth Defenders Toolkit Forum, or create a post to share what you would like to help with.

Contribute materials to the Toolkit

Although the first round of content for the Earth Defenders Toolkit has been created by Digital Democracy in close consultation with our co-creation partners, the Toolkit is intended to be an open project to which anyone is invited to contribute.

Communities and allied organizations are welcome to join us in helping write guides, identify tools, cull together case studies, or otherwise build the Earth Defenders Toolkit and ensure that we are creating directly useful material for earth defender communities across the globe. Please contact us and let us know how you would like to contribute materials.

Lastly, we also welcome contributions to the Earth Defenders Toolkit Seedbank ? blog post series. These are meant to be informal, short reflections on earth defender work. If you are interested in writing a blog, please get in touch.

Translation

The Earth Defenders Toolkit is being created for a global community, and we would be delighted to add more translations to the website -- including Indigenous and endangered languages. We have made this very easy to do using a platform called CrowdIn where you can easily add your own translations for the current website content, sentence by sentence. If you would like to add translations for a language not currently on the list, let us know.

Open-source tool development

Are you a software developer interested in contributing to open-source earth defender tools? We would love to help you get onboarded with the development roadmap and contribution guidelines for one of our featured tools such as Mapeo, Terrastories, or Community Lands. The Earth Defenders Toolkit website WordPress Theme code is on Github as well if you would like to make a suggestion for improvement, or use the code elsewhere.

We would also welcome discussion about other open-source tools in the Forum. In the future, we hope to create a dedicated space and even more opportunities for open-source volunteering and community building around earth defender tools.

Financial support

Earth defender communities around the world are under attack, and need your support. We strongly encourage you to research what's happening in your local community and fund frontline efforts directly.

The partners and allies featured on this website are in need of support. You can access their websites through links on the case studies and the about page, and we encourage you to donate to them directly.

If you would like to support Digital Democracy's maintenance of this toolkit, or further invest in the project, please reach out to us.