The Overbrook Foundation renews WITNESS’ three-year grant

WITNESS is excited to announce a three-year grant renewal from The Overbrook Foundation. The Overbrook Foundation supports organizations advancing human rights and conserving the natural environment.

A longtime supporter of WITNESS, The Overbrook Foundation has been funding our work for more than fifteen years. Overbrook has now pledged three years of renewed support to fund our work in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), where we are supporting human rights defenders across the region who are using video to expose the truth and catalyze human rights change, as well as protecting their safety and security in light of heightened threats. Video enables communities to counter hateful narratives and tell their own stories in the face of widespread prejudice and misinformation. Our longstanding work with several communities across Latin America (including an indigenous community in Juba Wajiín, Mexico and a media collective in Rio’s favelas) speaks to the power of disseminating resources to not only activists, but also to lawyers, public defenders, and movements.

For example, in 2013, WITNESS began working with activists in Mexico’s Juba Wajiin community to protect their ancestral lands from illegal mining, using advocacy videos to demonstrate indigenous identity and legal protection. One video was screened to advisors of Supreme Court justices and led to a ruling in 2017 that mining could not continue without community consultation. The community’s fight for land rights continues today, but by helping to push their cause into the spotlight, WITNESS and the Juba Wajiin community are making a powerful case for the use of video and technology to uphold the rule of law.

In the coming three years, WITNESS will work to enable this phenomenon at scale and across issues. Our planned work in LAC includes: protecting the environment and rights of indigenous communities in the Amazon; standing up to extractive industries; supporting Mexican women to speak out against inequality and challenging institutional violence in Brazil’s favelas. Together with The Overbrook Foundation, we will help to ensure that people all over Latin America can strengthen calls for advocacy through video and create lasting and meaningful change.

To read more about WITNESS’ work in Latin America, please click here.

To read more about The Overbrook Foundation, please click here.