For nearly two decades, Conde Nast Traveler has been honoring environmental visionaries around the world who have found innovative solutions to seemingly intractable problems. In 2008, both the winner and a runner-up of this prestigious award were Global Greengrants Fund grantees!
Silverius Oscar Unggul, the winner of the 2008 Conde Nast Traveler Environmental Prize, is an impassioned Indonesian activist who is tackling one of the decade’s most alarming ecological disasters—his country’s rapidly disappearing forests. A small grant from Greengrants’ Southeast Asia partner, The Samdhana Institute, helped jumpstart his work in 2005.
This support enabled Unggul and his organization, Network for Forestry, to set up a pilot village-based teakwood cooperative in Sulawesi, helping locals conserve forest resources while still making a living. Conde Nast reports, “The [program] . . . has been such a stunning success—and a financial windfall for farmers—that Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry touts it as a potential remedy for what even the government acknowledges is a nationwide environmental catastrophe.” To read more about this inspiring work in the Conde Nast profile, click here.
Prize runner-up Julio Solas founded Magdalena Baykeeper to protect the marine ecosystem of Baja Mexico. A grant from Greengrants in 2006 was used to implement a “clean campaign” for Magdalena Bay, a rich mangrove and tidal mud flat area home to Gray whales and green, hawksbill, and loggerhead turtles. Read the full profile here.
Our grants reach local leaders with few other options for funding. Both of these prizewinners represent the qualities our network looks for in grantees around the world: innovation, determination, collaboration, and persistence in the face of great difficulty. Congratulations!