19- 28 February 2014
Iquitos, Peru

We are seeking participants, friends and partner investors to contribute to this project: a leadership conference especially for young indigenous community leaders in Peru plus up to 13 individuals from extractive industries and other international organisations or from activists who associate with this cause.

Participating, either as a member of the conference, or for your organisation to become a member of the Hope of the Amazon Association project gives you the opportunity to explore aspects of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and a unique chance to contribute to new ways of understanding the roles of, and the relationships with native community leaders in the Amazonas.

We are a group of organisations, see below, sponsoring this project and fundraising to give conference scholarships to indigenous participants from groups like Comunidades Rivere’as and the OEPIAP community. These groups are formed by mixed race indigenous leaders who are sometimes expelled from their tribes because of cross-cultural relationships, or for getting ‘too in touch with civilization’. They are not protected by any international law and are at risk of falling into destructive behaviour often ending up being part of the socio-ecological problem of the Amazonas. These young leaders would like to better understand what kind of leadership is expected of themselves: by themselves, their people, mainstream Peruvian society, the government, and perhaps also by others still to be defined. Whilst the label ‘indigenous leaders’ suggests that they are a homogeneous community, in fact they come from many different tribes, with different traditions and perspectives on the position of each tribe in today’s Peru.

Indigenous communities often feel discriminated by the wider society, but unfortunately they also act out discrimination among themselves and between the different tribes. This conference will give them the opportunity to learn how to heal past experiences of division in a systemic way. This conference is the first stepping stone in a longer term Hope for the Amazonas Community project, enabling everyone to learn more wisdom in our roles as leaders and stewards of a sustainable global society. We see it as part of a much wider framework of action research, a long-term social science study around leadership roles and integrated corporate social responsibility. So the money that we gather from participants like you or a colleague from your organisation is transformed into scholarships (beca) for the indigenous participants and further on into research funds to make the project sustainable over time.

In association with: Bureau Kingsinton Inc; WorkLab; LSE Multi-Media Lab: Il Nodo Group; KimKabat; UCP, Peru.

More information: www.hopeoftheamazon.org