In the Philippines, the missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) are committing to plant 100,000 seedlings of Bamboo by 2022. With an ambitious goal for planting 1 billion bamboos by 2030, collaborating with the local churches of parishes and dioceses in the Philippines. But why Bamboo? The first reason is climate change.…
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Indeed, the Pygmies have always been the caretakers of the forest, truly forest advocates. Messok Dja, an area of Congo rainforest especially rich in biodiversity, is the ancestral land of the Baka people who have managed the forest since time immemorial. The Baka are one of the many Pygmy groups living in the forest spreading…
Read moreAs the power of corporations has grown, so should their responsibility towards human rights and our planet. Yet the reality is that around the world, harms to people’s rights through business activities continue to take place with impunity. In 2014 the UN Human Rights Council started a process to establish a treaty to regulate transnational corporations…
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The food crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic has opened new ways towards sustainability and self-reliance through vegetable gardens in the less-privileged communities of Johannesburg. In February 2020, Seed Community’s Green Business College (GBC) in partnership with Tim Nectare Farms launched the Ubuntu Project (www.ubuntuproject. africa) aimed at providing fresh food boxes and setting up…
Read more“Mining activities have huge impacts on the lives of the local communities and indigenous people in Brazil. I come from a country where mining has caused immeasurable disasters from colonial times to today”. A Comboni Missionary talk about his involvement in mining advocacy. The largest open-pit iron mine operates in the land where I worked…
Read moreBig rivers emerge from small springs. They spring forth in remote hills. Big ideas to change the world are also born on the edge. Great movements to transform societies do not start from the centre: they start in small places and incubate in some unknown sections of society. Rosa Parks refused to give up her…
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“A simple reception and some kind of accommodation” are “very different from a process of integration”. A personal experience. In about the year 2000, the U.K. government decided that it would send the largest number of its asylum seekers to Glasgow, an area that had never had new arrivals in large numbers except escapees from…
Read moreTo Missionaries, living the Gospel in a radical fashion is a way of advocating for the poor and the earth. The devise, Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation is a distant horizon that, however, continually attracts and directs their fragile and sometimes contradictory steps. One of these steps is to invest in the agroecology promoted…
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The UN Food Systems Summit was set out to review food systems to see if they ensure that the goal well defined by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, is achieved: “Build a world in which healthy and nutritious food is available and affordable for everyone, everywhere. But this should not be at the expense…
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On August 23, 2021, at the Tacagua’ camp of Challapata, Oruro (Bolivia), thanks to the support of the CASA Collective, about 150 members of the communities that make up the National Network of Women in Defense of Mother Earth gathered. The concern was the threat of mining companies in their attempt to explore in order…
Read moreAdvocacy is also defense when it acts to preserve the initial aims and values of modern discoveries. According to legend, when Vladimir Lenin was asked how he planned to “hang all the capitalists” in the face of a rope shortage in the young Soviet Union, he replied “don’t worry comrade; the capitalists will sell us…
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Advocacy is both defending people, especially the poor and vulnerable ones, and actions promoting values. Splitting the two, people and values, however, brings advocacy to a cleft stick of becoming a tricky ideological issue. Insofar, a clear set of values on the background of any advocacy is of acute need. Two significant examples are on…
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She played a key role in a campaign that challenged a corrupt waste trafficking scheme between Italy and Tunisia, resulting in the return of 6,000…
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The Black and white swallow flew high up in the clear, blue sky, wheeling and diving, his fast, pointed wings carrying him at a great speed. Swallow…
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Welcoming, listening and guiding. Some characteristics of Pope Leo with the youth During the years when Father Robert Francis Prevost was pastor of the church of Our…
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