Invest In Our Communities, Invest in Our Planet, Invest in Your Future

The Amazon plays a crucial role moderating climate change and protecting our health. It composes more than 40% of the world’s tropical rainforests, is home to more than 25% of terrestrial biodiversity, and has provided the source for more than 25% of all modern pharmaceuticals. It plays a key role as the source and gene bank of many of our most important food crops, and plays a crucial role in moderating rainfall and water flow around the globe.

A healthy Amazon is one of the keys to preventing future pandemics and ensuring a healthy future.

Healthy Communities <----> Healthy Planet

For more than 8000 years, small scale farmers, fishers, and local healers have stewarded and helped shape the Amazon, helping to create the thriving biome that we globally rely upon.

Our global society's "business as normal" practices such as large scale agriculture, illegal timbering, mining, oil and gas extraction, indiscriminate fishing, and other illegal activities threaten our communities and the Amazon’s ability to continue to play these vital global roles.

By Investing Now You Can Take a Step to Help Reverse These Trends

THE VASI MODEL

VASI offers a new paradigm that works from the principles of collaboration, equality, and transparency.

Founded by nine rural communities in the Peruvian Amazon, VASI is a model and a network to support rural and marginalized communities as they create sustainable futures and take their seats as leaders in global conversations.

We facilitate and connect. We bring everyone to the table.

We are guided by the understanding that true sustainability includes the economic, social, cultural, spiritual, and environmental, and recognizes the rights and dignity of all.

We are guided by our traditions and understanding that we are inseparable from nature, that animals, plants, lakes, mountains are not resources rather they are beings, they are our teachers, our doctors, our friends; an understanding that all beings that make up our planet are completely intra-connected and intra-dependent and that health, well-being, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation are tightly interwoven.

INVEST IN OUR COMMUNITIES INVEST IN OUR PLANET

Countless studies have shown that Indigenous Peoples and traditional land-based local indigenous descendent communities are those successfully caring for the majority of the systems upon which we depend. Yet,

ONLY 5%

OF ENVIRONMENTAL FUNDING DIRECTLY REACHES THE PEOPLE CARING FOR

36%

OF THE WORLD'S LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS &

80%

OF TERRESTRIAL BIODIVERSITY

ARE WE REALLY OK WITH THIS?

World-wide, countless studies have demonstrated that:

-ensuring that these communities have the legal rights to continue their efforts, and

-have access to healthcare, education, and viable incomes

are the two most fundamental and effective means to protect forests, lakes, and rivers and the species.

Invest in Your Future

In 2024, we aim to scale, fully funding our pilot Food Sovereignty, Conservation, and Climate Change Program and our Pilot Community Health Promoters Program. This will allow us to fully implement our work in 10 communities, while simultaneously continuing some of our district and province scale work improving access to health care.

Fully implementing these pilot programs will set the stage for a rigorous analysis of what works, what needs to be modified, and how to quickly scale across the district (the size of the US state of Delaware) and the province (the size and geographical diversity of all of the Hawaian Islands put together).

Thanks to a very successful Giving Tuesday 2023 campaign, we are on our way.

In 2024, your investment supports:

* Creation of a pilot Community Health Promoter Program to serve more than 3000 people living 6-10 hours from the nearest hospital. Local health promoters will be trained in both traditional plant based healing and conventional medical methods to act as first responders and volunteer paramedics in cases of emergency, provide triage and initial or basic treatment using both pharmaceutical and traditional medicines, lead local events focussed on nutrition and well-being, and accompany those with chronic conditions.

* Establishment of seed and germ-plasm banks, experimental agroforestry plots, and community gardens to help recover and protect species and varieties of highly nutrient dense and medicinal plants and increase their use in local diet.

* Creation of sustainable livelihoods to reduce pressure on forest, lake, and river systems.

*Development local, regional, and national markets for sustainably produced goods.

*Legalization and initial support to community based fisheries management and governance efforts in 3 communities.

* Construction of a pilot production plant to produce value added products from locally grown sources, provide fresh safe drinking water and internet access.

* Repairs and upgrades to the 3 River Ambulances and Province wide cold chain and cold storage system (for vaccines and temperature sensitive medicines).

*And more.

YOU ARE INVITED

This is your invitation to invest with us and join our work. VASI is what brings us hope and keeps us positive, we invite you join us in the work and in the joy.

PROJECTED RETURNS ON YOUR INVESTMENT

Over the next 10 years, we project measurable decreases in malnutrition, morbidity and mortality, overfishing, and deforestation. We project increases in local incomes, agro-diversity, biodiversity, forest health, carbon absorption, and well-being.

Returns on your investment will be in prevention of extreme storms, fires, droughts, and pandemics, and in our children’s ability to breathe freely.

Returns will be in the ability to look your children and your grandchildren in the eye and know that you are invested in doing something for their future.

Returns are in the joy of knowing there is hope for a healthy bright future.

All people have the right to healthcare, education, clean water, and nutritious food, our communities included. Research and experience shows that fulfilling these basic needs supports communities in their work caring for the Amazon and our world.

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OUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

With the generous support of people like you, over the past three years, our communities have clearly demonstrated the impact and efficiency when communities found, lead, and design the work. During that time amongst many other things we have:

1. Hosted multiple workshops, exchanges, and hands-on experiences through which more than 150 residents of 9 communities have furthered work creating biodiverse agroforests to increase food sovereignty, create sustainable livelihoods, conserve biodiversity and adapt to and mitigate climate change.

2.Re-initiated and gained legal recognition for community-based fisheries management in an initial group of 3 lakes.

3.Installed three (3) river ambulances which continue to serve the ~17,000 people in our district.

4. Installed the province wide (an area the size of all of the Hawaiian Islands combined) cold chain and cold storage, helping 45,000 people have access to vaccines and temperature sensitive medicines (such as antivenom),

5.Begun to build a global like-minded network of communities, organizations, individuals.

Together we have accomplished all that, and more, with only partial funding.

Imagine with us, what we will do together this year.

Imagine with us a future where all of our grandchildren thrive; imagine what that would feel like.

VASI enjoys 5013c status through our fiscal sponsor Utopia Foundation. All donations are tax deductible. UTOPIA Foundation covers, free of charge, many of the expenses of receiving donations and maintaining non-profit certification. As a result, each of your donations has a greater effect. To avoid all transaction fees, you can send us a check at Utopia Foundation, 123 W. Front Street suite 2B, Traverse City, MI 49684. Please, write VASI in the notes or Memo section.

In addition to generous individual donors this work has been supported by:

"Our globalized society has been degrading and destroying natural ecosystems across the entire planet. The future of the Amazon and the world depends on us. We must support and learn from indigenous and local communities as we co-reate and implement collective solutions increasing well-being, conserving biodiversity, and mitigating climate change, disseminating seeds of hope towards a brighter future." Joao Campos da Silva, Instituto Juruá