Frontline communities leveraged British Petroleum oil disaster money to build an innovative participatory reparations fund.
After the 2010 BP oil spill, an industrial disaster that wreaked havoc on the coast, GCCLP worked with frontline Indigenous communities to move money through a participatory funding process rooted in accountability and reparations.
This experience resulted in the Gulf South Rising (GSR), a Community Controlled Fund that emerged as part of our Katrina 10 response. The GSR Fund became a vehicle to develop a transparent and fully accountable process to inform how moves to communities for community needs and work.
These two processes serve as the grounding for the GS4GND Community Controlled Fund (CCF), a regional fund that serves the five Gulf South states and Puerto Rico.
In 2021, we launched the fundraising effort – raising over $16 million for a 3-year investment in the GS4GND. All of the funds are designed to go through a participatory budget process and move to support local, state, and regional action, organizing, capacity, and communication.
The lessons learned through this process are the root of the Global Climate Reparations Fund, which will be launched soon.