Children of the Pastaza
Your support empowers Achuar youth to access education without leaving home - protecting culture, family, and the rainforest that sustains life on Earth.
This is not charity. It's a long term investment in planetary stability.
Supporting education for Indigenous youth in the Ecuadorian Amazon is one of the most effective ways to protect rainforest ecosystems long-term.
When Indigenous communities are able to educate their children within their culture, on their ancestral land, forests stay standing. When they are not, deforestation and displacement follow.
We must do our part to honor and stand with the very people whose wisdom and ancestral ways have protected life on earth for millennia.
Sponsor a Student
Today, Achuar youth stand at a crossroads. They carry ancestral knowledge rooted in land, language, and relationship, while also facing a rapidly changing world that demands new skills.
Right now, students in Sharamentsa can only complete their education through middle school. To attend high school, children as young as 14 years old must leave
their community and travel to distant Ecuadorian towns and cities.
Many students live away from their families for the entire school year at a pivotal age, facing isolation, cultural disconnection, and trauma, simply to access an
education.
Our Sponsor a Student program changes this.
Frequency
One time
Monthly
Amount
$20
$50
$100
$200
Other
Life-Centered Education. Rooted Learning.
This approach to learning recognizes that education does not exist apart from life - it emerges from it. For generations, Achuar children learned within their community guided by family, elders, and the living forest.
Knowledge was relational: learned through observation, responsibility, ceremony, storytelling, and daily participation in community life. Education was not something that pulled children away from life, it was something that prepared them to care for it.
Life-Centered Education understands humans as part of living systems, not separate from them. It values relationships over extraction, continuity over disruption, and responsibility over dominance.
Achuar youth need both the tools of the modern education system; literacy, technology, critical thinking, and credentials alongside the ancestral knowledge that grounds them in identity, responsibility, and relationship to the living forest.
Life-Centered Education does not ask them to choose between these worlds. It honors the wisdom being shared from all sources and encourages this next generation of forest protectors to stand strong in their traditional ways while also trusting and participating in what is emerging.
Your Support Ensures
Families Stay Together
Cultural Wisdom is Passed Down Through Generations
