URL: http://www.amazonteam.org/news/index.php/4/ACT_founders_win_Skoll_Award_for_Social_Entrepreneurship
ACT founders win Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship
March 11, 2008
Arlington, VA - March 11, 2008 - The Amazon Conservation Team today announced it is the recipient of a two-year, $1,015,000 award from the Skoll Foundation to expand biocultural conservation efforts to map, manage, and protect 100 million acres of rainforest. The award is one of 11 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship presented by the Skoll Foundation in 2008 in recognition of the most innovative and sustainable approaches to resolving the world's most urgent social issues.
ACT joins a prestigious global network of Skoll entrepreneurs, who are working around the world on issues including tolerance and human rights, health, economic and social equity, peace and security, institutio
nal responsibility, and environmental sustainability.
The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) is an international not-for-profit organization that partners with indigenous peoples across Amazonia to conserve biodiversity, traditional culture, and health. ACT has forged collaborative relationships with 28 tribes, providing them with the tools necessary to map, manage, and protect their territories - totaling more than 40 million acres of ancestral rainforests. ACT has also launched enduring Shamans and Apprentices programs that preserve, strengthen, and promote indigenous knowledge of the Amazon's medicinal plants, and provide training to tribal leaders in sustainable agriculture and economic development.
"Indigenous peoples know, manage and protect the rainforest far better than we do," asserts Dr. Plotkin, who is an internationally renowned ethnobotanist and President of the Amazon Conservation Team. "If you want to protect the rainforest, why not enlist the assistance of the people who actually live there? This is the only way that equilibrium change can be brought about in terms of protecting the greatest expression of life on earth."
Liliana Madrigal, noted Costa Rican conservationist and co-founder of ACT, adds: "The only way to truly bring equilibrium change in efforts to preserve the rainforests of the Amazon - including both their rich biodiversity and indigenous culture - is if the voice of the indigenous people who inhabit the remaining forests is heard and their legal rights respected and enforced."
"The Amazon Conservation Team is a tremendous addition to the community of Skoll social entrepreneurs who have demonstrated, through their inspiration and creativity, courage and fortitude, that solutions do exist for some of the world's most intractable problems," said Sally Osberg, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation. "Like all the organizations in our portfolio, ACT is successfully tackling complex social issues with a sustainable, scalable solution. We believe their work has the potential for transformational benefit to indigenous cultures and forests of the Amazon and we're honored to support their continued commitment to systemic change at the grassroots level."
Mark Plotkin and Liliana Madrigal will be presented the award by Skoll Foundation Chairman Jeff Skoll, Skoll Foundation President and CEO, Sally Osberg and special guest former President Jimmy Carter, at a special ceremony on March 27 at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University. They will be participating in the three-day World Forum along with over 700 attendees from the global social entrepreneurship community.
About The Amazon Conservation Team
The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) was founded in 1996. Noting that indigenous lands comprise approximately 25% of the Amazon basin, Dr. Plotkin and Ms. Madrigal created an organization based on a unique strategy: biocultural conservation, which rests on the conviction that the people who best know, use, and protect biodiversity are the indigenous people who live in the tropical forests and depend on them for both their material and their spiritual needs. To have a real impact on biodiversity conservation, projects must work closely with social, cultural, and political realities at local and regional levels. By partnering with indigenous tribes throughout the Amazon to map, manage, and protect the rainforest, ACT ensures the successful conservation of the biodiversity, culture, and health of the Amazon's ecosystem-the flora, fauna, and the indigenous people.
About the Skoll Foundation
The Skoll Foundation was created in 1999 by eBay's first president, Jeff Skoll, to promote his vision of a more peaceful and prosperous world. Today the Skoll Foundation advances systemic change to benefit communities around the world by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs -individuals dedicated to innovative, bottom-up solutions that transform unequal and unjust social, environmental and economic systems.
The Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship is the foundation's flagship program. There are currently 50 organizations represented by 59 remarkable social entrepreneurs in the program, working individually and together across regions, countries and continents to evolve the field of social entrepreneurship into a global movement for social change. The Skoll Foundation connects social entrepreneurs and other partners in the field via an online community at www.socialedge.org, and through the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.
The foundation also celebrates social entrepreneurs by telling their stories through partnerships with the PBS Foundation and the Sundance Institute, with the goal of promoting large-scale public awareness of social entrepreneurship.
For more information about the Skoll Foundation, visit www.skollfoundation.org
To visit the Amazon Conservation Team on the web visit: www.amazonteam.org
Contact the Amazon Conservation Team about this release: 703-522-4684