Capability Activities Hosting learning communities and building capacityConducting pilot projects: ASHA is piloting a number of projects devoted to reforestation and the creation of a regenerative bioeconomy. Their aim is to ensure the conservation of 49.4 million acres and the restoration of 21.5 million acres of forest necessary to maintain the connectivity of the Andean Amazon landscape. Developing education programmes: ASHA is developing the Living School of the Amazon (Escuela Viva de la Amazonía, EVA) which will support technical training for Amazonian youth and intellectual property (IP) protection for ancestral knowledge. Conducting capacity building: ASHA is strengthening Indigenous institutional capacity and leadership of member organizations for territorial governance, advocacy, project implementation and financial management. Investing in systemic solutionsSub-granting to collectives: ASHA is creating a Sacred Headwaters Fund that will directly support Indigenous-led initiatives for food security, livelihood alternatives, forest monitoring, intercultural health and education, and renewable energy. Developing financing solutions: ASHA is developing systemic solutions to incentivize forest protection and halt deforestation (cancelling debt, well-being indicators, universal basic/intact forest income, bioeconomy hubs, voluntary carbon credits and ecosystems services). The vast network of waterways born in the glaciers of the Andes of Ecuador and Peru descends to form the headwaters of the innumerable rivers that feed the Marañón and the Amazon River itself. These headwaters, which extend over an area of 86 million acres (35 million hectares), are home to more than 30 Indigenous nationalities, and to dense forests that support incalculable forms of life. These are some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, regulating the hydrological cycle of much of the South American continent and, indeed, the climate for our entire planet. These sacred headwaters are of vital importance as we face a human-driven ecological crisis of unprecedented proportions. The ecological crisis is exacerbated by the increase in the extraction of oil and minerals, and deforestation to log timber, and propelled by a “modernizing” logic that treats “nature” as if it were a mere resource to generate short-term profit to benefit of a small subset of life forms that exist on Earth.The Sacred Headwaters initiative proposes a viable alternative to this modernizing logic, one that, in its stead, seeks to “ecologize” our economies, our political structures and our modes of ethical behaviour. The Sacred Headwaters Initiative recognizes this hydrographically inspired Amazonian form of relating and coming together across differences, drawing inspiration from it as it creates political alliances between nationalities, governments and NGOs to face the planetary ecological crisis affecting us all. These alliances are nested within each other in the same way that the vast sacred headwaters of the Upper Amazon link one basin to another through their emerging networks. We have much to learn from the wisdom of the Indigenous Peoples, to protect the vast Amazon basin of Ecuador and Peru, since it is the only possible solution that is now within our grasp if we aspire to reach the future. – Wisdom Keepers Council, Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance. Source: Adapted from Sacred Headwaters: Territories for Life, prepared by Eduardo Kohn based on the deliberations of the 1st gathering of the Council of Wisdom Keepers, Tumbaco, Ecuador, May 2019.Collective action activities (continued) Case vignette: Sacred Headwaters: Territories for life The Future is Collective: Case Studies of Collective Social Innovation 11

The Future is Collective Case Studies of Collective Social Innovation 2025