URI’s Environmental Satellite Cooperation Circle is currently reviewing applications for its second round of environmental “seed grants.”
As it did in 2011, the Environmental Satellite CC -- formerly a Satellite of the URI President’s Council – will award grants ranging from $100 to $2,000 USD to Cooperation Circles whose work fulfills URI’s mission to “create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings.” Members of the CC will announce the 2012 grant recipients on Sept. 21, the International Day of Peace.
In choosing grant recipients, members of the Environmental Satellite CC will emphasize activities that address the threat of climate change and that help to preserve the diversity and abundance of life on Earth. Proposals that achieve those goals through energy conservation and the use of renewable resources will receive special consideration from the CC.
Many of the 2011 grant recipients combined public education about the environment with activities that had a direct ecological impact. In Uganda, URI’s Great Lakes Region Office followed two presentations highlighting the importance of conservation – which drew a combined audience of about 300 – with the planting of more than 700 trees. In Pakistan, the Pakistan Council for Social Welfare and Human Rights CC helped create a public information campaign about the use of hazardous pollutants in the Poonch District, and helped distribute more than 10,000 seedlings for plangent in the area.
Other award-winning projects included those submitted by the Green Prophet CC, which created a downloadable blogging guide intended to turn the reader “into a champion writer for the environment,” and a combination of three CCs – Trust WIN (Women’s Interfaith Network), MADA and Women Reborn – who created a “Garden of the Mothers” (pictured above) in Northern Israel, both as a memorial to those who died in the Mount Carmel Forest fire of 2010 and to celebrate ten years of women’s interfaith work in the region.
The environmental seed grant project has been made possible through the generosity of two donors in the San Francisco, California Bay Area.
