2025 was a year of renewal and rethinking for our coalition. Despite widespread political upheaval and disruptions to global development funding, it provided us with new momentum and vigor to strengthen our position as a global solidarity network that delivers critical and strategic advancements for the rights and development of Indigenous Peoples (IP), local communities (LC), and Afro-descendent Peoples (ADP) across the world.
We began by celebrating the 20th anniversary of RRI’s founding, which was a vital opportunity to take stock of our collective accomplishments and challenges over the last two decades and reflect on our place in the new global realities of the sector. We engaged in thoughtful conversations throughout the year with RRI’s founders, earliest champions, Indigenous elders, women leaders, youth, and our global allies to map the coalition’s journey over the last 20 years. We also commissioned an independent review of RRI’s progress toward achieving its current five-year Strategic Program, which expires in 2027.
All this stocktaking confirmed RRI’s singular positioning within its ecosystem as the only coalition that brings together a diverse and vibrant set of movements led by IPs, LCs, and ADPs—and their women and youth—to leverage the power of collective action to secure their rights and agency. They underscored our extensive experience advancing movement-building within rightsholder-led organizations and producing timely and strategic analysis to inform major policy and paradigm changes, as well as our thought leadership and ability to convene unlikely allies.
Most importantly, it laid the foundation for a radical restructuring of our coalition. This restructure, which took effect in early 2026, added many new national rightsholder organizations to our core group of partners, created an Advisory Council and a Council of Elders, clarified coalition governance and admission process, and added youth, Afro-descendant Peoples, and Indigenous representation from North America to our Board of Directors. All these changes further cemented our position as an Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and local community-led solidarity network with unique value-add in the sector.
Within this context, the RRI coalition worked throughout the year to catalyze new global funding commitments at COP30, channel direct funding to communities through our rightsholder-led funding mechanism, CLARIFI, and advance the legal recognition of rightsholders’ land and resource rights. We facilitated the first-ever global network of IP, ADP, and LC youth activists, elevated the voices and leadership of women leaders, strengthened community monitoring of land-based investments and supply chains, and promoted rights-based conservation initiatives to thwart biodiversity loss. This Annual Report shares a selection of these examples of impact led by our coalition members in 2025.
I remain grateful to our partners, donors, and allies for their continued support to fuel our success and keep us moving forward.
In solidarity,
