PROGRAM AREA: CROSS-PROGRAM
Addressing emerging, intersectional issues
CS Fund addresses critical, emerging issues outside of our program areas with intersectional implications for our collective work, including transition mineralsand technofascism. These issues - brought to our attention by social movement partners - bridge several sectors that are often siloed and in need of more resources to develop strategy and organizing.
Transition Minerals
Approach
Demand for transition minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper is exploding globally, driven by AI and data centers, alternative energy, electric vehicles, and consumer electronics. Transition minerals are showing up as a key piece of climate negotiations, trade agreements, and defense commitments. This has serious ramifications for Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities who are stewarding the lands, waters and territories where mineral deposits are located, largely in the Global South.
Advance Indigenous self-determination, free prior and informed consent, and benefit sharing from the forthcoming economic transition across international treaties and fora and critical site fights.
Advance priorities across our programs:
Protect Indigenous Peoples’ rights to land and natural resources
Support protest movements protecting land and water from corporate exploitation
Fight trade agreements utilized to circumvent environmental protections
Ensure a green energy transition for Global North countries does not violate the rights of Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities in the Global South
Technofascism
Rising authoritarianism is being wielded through the power and platforms of Big Tech and its oligarchs. Technofascism takes the form of misinformation/ disinformation campaigns on social media platforms, restrictions on access and use of the internet, experimental surveillance technologies that target vulnerable communities, lobbying to advance deregulation, and institutional partnerships in the form of government defense contracts. Technofascism endangers democracies and ecologies across the globe.
Approach
Build community and movement power to protect against surveillance and criminalization and combat Big Tech from the local to intergovernmental scale.
Advance priorities across programs:
Fight land grabs for tech infrastructure that threaten food and land sovereignty
Confront the impacts of digital agriculture and the increasing use of tech platforms to impose geoengineering schemes
Combat corporate and government surveillance and defense technologies
Fight trade agreements utilized to advance deregulation
Advance digital rights that ensure equitable access to technology, data protection, and community control over digital resources
Geography
This program makes grants in the US and internationally.