Since 1970, we’ve celebrated Earth Day as a celebration of our planet and to bring attention to environmental issues. In recent years, the climate crisis has made that mission all the more critical. Already, climate-fueled disasters are destroying crops and displacing millions of people a year, and each of us are affected by those ripple effects. As the climate changes, how can we change, too?
By bolstering communities’ resilience to a changing climate, we can empower them to succeed. Many of our charity partners are already doing just that – training farmers to use drought-resistant plants, providing rainwater harvesting systems, creating and repairing infrastructure, and more. With their help, local communities will be able to adapt to and thrive in new climate patterns.
Read how six of our charity partners – Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Clinton Foundation, WaterAid, World Food Program USA, Church World Service, and Human Rights Watch – are helping communities become more climate resilient below. Then, celebrate Earth Day with a donation to these charities to ensure their work is felt for generations to come.
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
Ineza Umuhoza Grace, Global Coordinator and co-founder of the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition, first experienced the effects of the climate crisis at an early age when her family home in Rwanda was destroyed due to intensive rainfall and wind. “But growing up,” Ineza says, “I didn’t know that was the impact of climate change.” For Ineza, connecting this formative experience to the changing climate came later. “After high school, I was watching the news one evening and then I saw on the television a particular area in my country where the community was being forced to move because of flooding and erosion. On the television you could see that most of the people who were being displaced were women and children. And that reminded me of the powerless feeling that I had back then.”
Called to address the climate crisis and serve in her community, Ineza decided to study environmental engineering at the University of Rwanda. In 2020, Ineza helped found the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition (“LDYC”), a coalition of youth from the global North and the global South who join together to drive action, demand justice, and address loss and damage brought on by climate change. With more than 300 members from 40 countries, the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition is committed to sharing and amplifying the voices of youth impacted by the climate crisis while holding global systems and processes accountable.
As it is for many grassroots organizations around the world, UUSC is LDYC’s first funder, meaning UUSC is the first organization to provide LDYC with direct financial support.
“Having [UUSC support] allowed us to be able to catalyze other funding because, you know how this system works, once you have one funder you are able to get the next one which is really incredible.” – Ineza Umuhoza Grace
Clinton Foundation
Data shows that women and children will be among the most vulnerable to climate change. Globally, women represent 80% of climate refugees and are exponentially more likely to die in natural disasters. Despite this, women are too far and few between in the spaces where they can make a tangible difference and help chart a clean energy future – in boardrooms, senior management roles, and technical careers in the energy sector.
That’s why the Clinton Foundation started Women in Renewable Energy Network (the WIRE Network), a professional development group for women working in energy in island nations. work to eliminate barriers to entry and career advancement in sustainable energy through mentorship, technical skills training, strategic partnerships, and raising awareness for the issue. Mentees and mentors are also encouraged to fulfill a Commitment to Action – a new, specific, and measurable project that addresses a challenge within the nexus of gender and energy in their own communities. Past commitments have helped distribute LED lightbulbs to female-headed households and promoted engineering at all-girls schools.
Since its founding, more than 560 individuals from more than 60 countries have joined the network.
WaterAid
10% of people worldwide don’t have a reliable source of clean water, and the intensifying climate crisis is making this worse. Extreme weather, floods and droughts are having a devastating impact, damaging communities’ access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services, pushing some people further into disease and poverty, and causing others to struggle for the first time. For example, communities in the Shyamnagar region of Bangladesh face rapidly rising sea levels and increasingly frequent cyclones, which can contaminate drinking water sources with salty water.
To solve the problem of water salinity, WaterAid built rainwater harvesting systems to provide clean water for more than 19,000 people. They also reached more than 4,500 people with water cleaned by pond sand filters, a system that removes contaminants by pumping water through several chambers containing sand and gravel.
Before WaterAid’s assistance, Sharmila Sardar, 26, had to spend two to three hours a day travelling 3 km to collect water for her family, forcing her to close her grocery store in Purbo Durgabati and lose customers. The water from the village pond was not safe: “My children would always have a stomach ache from drinking the pond water, and we had to take them far away to get treated in the community clinic,” said Sharmila.
With a clean source now close to home, Sharmila can keep the shop open all day, her family’s health has improved and her business is thriving. “Now, having a pond sand filter nearby, I am able to give time to my business, take my children to school on time and look after my garden and [do] household chores.”
World Food Program USA
For three years, Yar Mayom Arok dreamed of returning to her home in Jalle, a small South Sudanese town. She and her family fled their home in 2020, when floodwaters from the nearby Nile River broke through a dike and flooded their town in the central part of the country. The family sought refuge in a camp for displaced families in Mangalla, some 100 miles south of their home.
Three years later, the town is now dry and Yar’s dream of returning home came true thanks to an ambitious United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) project to repair a crucial dike holding back the Nile’s overflow. Since coming home, Yar has started a new business selling tea. She hopes to earn enough money to reopen her shop and to buy new livestock.
Yar’s family is among the millions that the U.N. World Food Programme supports with food and cash assistance. Yar also participates in resilience and infrastructure projects in South Sudan, a country that is at the forefront of the climate crisis and bearing the brunt of more frequent and intense weather-related shocks. The dike rehabilitation is just one of many initiatives the U.N. World Food Programme is rolling out to tackle the climate crisis, improve food security, and develop rural economies in South Sudan.
Church World Service
Between 2017 and 2020, droughts and floods have devastated Kenya, including in West Pokot County, in Kenya’s North Rift region. Crops failed and livestock died, and an increasing number of people left in search of work and survival elsewhere. Conflicts between communities flared as competition for scarce resources strained relations.
The Church World Service team jumped in to provide short-term and long-term support. They distributed emergency food rations and blankets to 750 families following deadly flooding and landslides. Then, after extensive conversation with and data collection in communities in West Pokot County, CWS began to train local families modern beekeeping techniques for a climate-resilient way to maintain financial stability.
Beekeeping is a great way for families to earn incomes while living in harsh climates. It is an activity with a limited environmental footprint, and families can earn a significant income by harvesting and selling honey. CWS and local partners are helping families use modern beekeeping technologies, which include better hive designs and have the potential to help families earn six times as much as traditional beekeeping. When disaster strikes, the income that they have earned from activities like beekeeping can help them pay for supplies and repairs to speed recovery. Plus, on a practical note, beehives hang in trees, high above floodwaters. They are more likely than other livelihood activities to survive a flood unscathed.
Angolekori Kale from the community of Amura is one of these beekeepers. During this time of economic fear and uncertainty, Angolekori is financially stable. “I have five modern beehives, with two that have been colonized,” he says. “I harvested honey from one of them, which I sold to African Beekeepers Limited, a buyer introduced to us by CWS … My family includes four children and a wife, and we all felt so good when we received the money.”
Human Rights Watch
As people around the world increasingly experience the devastating effects of environmental crises, governments must be held accountable to implement and enforce regulations, and climate activists must be protected from intimidation and legal threats. Human Rights Watch champions human rights law to force governments to protect people and prevent corporations from continuing to cause extreme environmental degradation.
In one example, the Guna Indigenous people living on Panama’s small island of Gardi Sugdub began requesting government support for their relocation to a safer mainland site in 2010 due to sea level rise and lack of living space. But it took over a decade – and a Human Rights Watch report – for progress to be made. In 2023, the Human Rights Watch team released a report documenting both why the community decided to relocate and how government delays and incomplete support for relocation have stalled the move and left the community in limbo.
Since the release of that report, the government has made significant progress. The relocation site on the mainland now has the planned 300 houses, cultural gathering centers built in the community’s traditional style, and a nearby school with sports facilities. But the Panamanian government has yet to make adequate water, sanitation, and health care available at the relocation site.
Blas Lopez, a Guna community leader, told Human Rights Watch: “Officially, the keys will be handed over, but the problem is going to be water. We can’t live [there] without water.”
Human Rights Watch continues to advocate for the rights of the Guna people as they relocate to safer grounds.
Make a donation to one of these six charity partners in your workplace to help create a more climate resilient future.
