The Earth Elders
In 2013, more than one hundred Indigenous Elders gathered to seek guidance for humanity amid mounting global crises. From that convening emerged the Earth Mandates — living instructions to restore balance with the Earth. The Rising Earth Fund exists to bring the Fifth Mandate to life.
To nurture wise leadership rooted in the principles of care, reciprocity, and guardianship.
Through these councils, Original Peoples and allies gather to make decisions that honor the Earth as a living being, ensuring that communities speak and act in service to the whole.
To identify, defend, and regenerate the sacred lands, waters, and ecosystems essential to life.
Sacred natural sites are the world's oldest protected places — the beating hearts of global ecosystems. The IUCN affirms that these sites hold exceptional biodiversity and anchor the ecological web of entire landscapes. The Rising Earth Fund stands with Original Peoples as the rightful guardians of these sacred places.
Explore Sacred Natural SitesTo revitalize and transmit the teachings that sustain balance between humanity and nature.
These centers serve as sanctuaries for intergenerational learning, where Indigenous wisdom and modern understanding meet to guide collective healing and resilience.
To weave bridges among cultures and generations through shared stories, ceremonies, and action.
This Mandate calls for open dialogue that transcends boundaries — amplifying the voices of the Original Peoples and inspiring global movements for Earth's regeneration.
To safeguard the lands where culture and ecology are one, and to renew the sacred relationship between people and place.
This Mandate calls on all nations to protect life's interconnected web — ensuring that both human and natural communities can flourish together for generations to come. The Rising Earth Fund exists to bring this Mandate to life.
The mandate this fund was born to serve
Mandate II in Depth
Across the Earth, sacred forests, mountains, rivers, and springs hold generations of relationship between people and place. Protected through ancestral responsibility, customary law, and spiritual practice, these landscapes carry an enduring legacy of care. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) identifies sacred sites as the oldest form of protected areas and recognizes many as important reservoirs of biodiversity.
For the Rising Earth Fund, this understanding speaks directly to our purpose: supporting Original Peoples as the rightful guardians and decision-makers in the protection and regeneration of their ancestral territories. Sacred natural sites belong at the heart of that vision — a living web of land, water, species, knowledge, and ceremony.
Many sacred natural sites shelter rare plants, endangered species, and habitats that have disappeared from surrounding landscapes. Their ecological richness reflects generations of community stewardship, including practices that limit extraction and protect places of particular significance. In northern Ethiopia, church forests offer a powerful example: surviving forest refuges within landscapes extensively transformed by agriculture. These places offer a foundation for regeneration — supporting their custodians helps sustain both the habitats that remain and the relationships through which they have endured.
Sacred sites can contribute to connected networks of protected land and water, alongside restored habitats and ecological corridors that allow species to move, adapt, and thrive under a changing climate. Because they are often distributed across whole regions — a ridge, a river bend, a grove held sacred by one community and another — they can serve as stepping stones linking larger landscapes together. This approach aligns with the Global Biodiversity Framework's emphasis on well-connected protected systems, integrated into wider landscapes and seascapes, to support biodiversity and resilience.
The future of sacred natural sites is closely bound to the continuity of their custodians' knowledge, institutions, and spiritual traditions. IUCN's guidance recognizes the importance of working with custodians and respecting the cultural and spiritual values that sustain these places. For Rising Earth, this means placing Indigenous leadership at the centre of regeneration: strengthening community authority, supporting the transmission of ancestral knowledge, and directing resources toward priorities defined by the people of each territory.
Recognition rooted in rights
Global biodiversity commitments create opportunities to recognize this stewardship. Where they meet the relevant criteria, sacred natural sites may qualify as protected areas or Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures (OECMs). Recognition must respect Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' rights, governance, and free, prior, and informed consent. The opportunity for philanthropy is to help sustain this living inheritance through lasting support for its guardians.
Support the guardians. Protect sacred places. Help regenerate the living Earth.
The Stewards
The Earth Elders is a global environmental non-profit working to preserve Indigenous Knowledge Systems and to empower Traditional Guardians with the tools and resources they need to safeguard nature.
Original Peoples steward more than 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity. They carry deep ancestral knowledge of the interdependent relationships that underpin life on Earth — insights that hold a key to humanity's collective future. Yet, as our ecological crisis reaches dangerous tipping points, they now face unprecedented challenges.
Through the leadership of Original Peoples, The Earth Elders carry the Earth Mandates forward as a response to the Prophecy — to heal what has been broken and guide humanity back into balance with the living world.
Guardian of Qulla Wisdom
Emma Edelmira Alemán in ceremony — an Argentine Earth Elder carrying the ancestral knowledge of the Qulla people.
Photo by Melanie Pyne
A global initiative to safeguard and restore the planet's most vital bio-cultural territories.
Centers of ancestral wisdom where people learn to protect land, life, and future generations.
Embedding natural law and biocultural rights into global policy, ensuring nature is honored.