WEA and URI launch The Ripple Academy! 

Women’s Earth Alliance and United Religions Initiative have joined forces to launch The Ripple Academy, a coordinated training experience to equip leading change-makers with the skills, tools, and alliances they need to build bridges of cooperation and environmental solutions for generations to come.

Designed collaboratively by a global team, The Ripple Academy will bring together the best of URI and WEA’s training models. In its first year, 15-20 grassroots women leaders will complete coordinated trainings, building their skills in leadership, action planning and environmental stewardship. Ripple Academy participants will transform grassroots initiatives into high-impact and scalable projects with long-term ripple effects. Technical and entrepreneurship training, a networking platform, leadership skills, and mentorship will empower participants to organize communities, mobilize resources, and launch environmental projects and campaigns.

This is the ripple effect that WEA and URI have seen again and again in our work — that agency, skills, and empowerment build upon themselves exponentially.

WEA and URI have nurtured networks of committed grassroots leaders in a combined 100 countries over 28 years. Our organizations share a core commitment to following the lead of the grassroots leaders who are on the ground, sparking change in their own communities. As URI Director Rev. Victor Kazanjian said, “We are both light-framed organizations. We are not organizations looking to build a big center that dictates what should be done. We’re not a development agency. We push resources out into communities to women so they can create change in their own communities.”

WHY WOMEN AND THE ENVIRONMENT?

Because when women thrive, the natural world, peace, and justice thrive. As underscored by countless governments, development agencies, and the United Nations alike, women are often both the most impacted by conflict and environmental crises, as well as best positioned to design and spread solutions. This work fosters women’s environmental leadership because without a healthy natural world and access to water, food and clean energy, peace cannot flourish.

“WEA and this partnership with URI — this is not small. This is at the very core and very heart of what it is we have to understand, enable, support, protect, honor, and allow to come forth…We can reverse global warming but we can’t unless we empower the majority of the world. And that would be women and girls.”
— Paul Hawken, Author, Entrepreneur, WEA Advisory Board Member

Download our brochure for more information on The Ripple Academy.