Our Roots

LAN PAWANKA emerged from more than eleven years of collaboration between the Pawanka Fund and Indigenous organizations across the world’s seven sociocultural regions. Throughout this journey, shared experiences, lessons learned, and organizational priorities revealed the need for a capacity-strengthening program designed by and for Indigenous Peoples.

To shape this vision collectively, Pawanka conducted a participatory organizational diagnosis with a representative group of strategic partners from the world’s seven sociocultural regions. Selected through a collaborative process to reflect the diversity of Indigenous organizational realities, these partners contributed their experiences through 38 virtual interviews and the co-creation of a culturally relevant diagnostic tool covering governance, strategic planning, financial and administrative management, project implementation, external relations, and organizational capacity strengthening. The process was guided by the Fund’s principles of self-determination, reciprocity, interculturality, solidarity, and intergenerational knowledge transmission.

The organizational diagnosis identified the cultural identity, ancestral knowledge, and community governance systems of Indigenous organizations as their greatest strengths, recognizing them as the foundation of organizational legitimacy, collective cohesion, and resilience. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of participating organizations reported consensus-based decision-making, demonstrating the continued strength of Indigenous governance across diverse contexts. 

The diagnosis also revealed common structural challenges that continue to affect many Indigenous organizations, including high dependence on external funding (more than 80%), limited institutional memory due to the absence of systematic knowledge management mechanisms (91%), fragmented document management systems that increase the risk of information loss (55%), digital capacity gaps related to connectivity and technical skills (73%), and the need to strengthen the meaningful participation of women, youth, and traditional knowledge holders in leadership and decision-making processes (55%). 

These collective findings became the foundation of LAN PAWANKA. In response to the priorities identified through the organizational diagnosis, the program was designed as a multi-level learning model that combines practical tools, peer exchange, mentoring, and intercultural learning processes to strengthen Indigenous organizations while building on their own knowledge systems, governance practices, and cultural strengths.