The Center for Socio-Environmental Support is a grantmaking and capacity-building organization focused on providing small grants and trainings to strengthen grassroots, environmental, nongovernmental, and civil society organizations. This grant renewal will support the small grants program in South America to build capacity in local communities impacted by large-scale energy and infrastructure projects, which are funded by international and national financial institutions, including the Brazilian Development Bank.

This grant will support the first phase of a six-year program to develop Mexican community foundations. The Inter-American Foundation will manage a program that will focus on members of Comunalia, a recently created network of Mexican community foundations. Over the next three years, the program will develop a trained cadre of 40 emerging community foundation leaders, enhance Comunalia members' grantmaking capacity for grassroots initiatives through a challenge grant program requiring local matching, strengthen the institutional capacity of Comunalia members through technical assistance, and help consolidate Comunalia as a viable member support organization. The contributions of the Mott and Inter-American foundations, totaling $801,234, are expected to leverage an additional estimated $1.6 million mainly from Mexican national and local sources. The Inter-American Foundation is an independent United States government agency created by Congress in 1969 to channel development assistance directly to the organized poor in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This renewal will support the continued work of the Uruguayan Study Center of Appropriate Technologies to research and analyze the impacts of trade and integration policies on the environment in South America and develop environmentally sustainable alternatives. This project will produce policy analysis from original research; disseminate research findings via Web sites, publications, and a variety of media outlets; conduct workshops with environmental organizations, citizens' groups, academics, and local and national government officials; and develop tools for integrating environmental considerations in regional economic integration processes.