Our Structure

The Indigenous Rights Fund (IRF) is structured to meet the complex legal and financial challenges Indigenous Peoples face when asserting their rights. At its core, the fund is built upon Indigenous-led legal expertise. We work directly with Indigenous communities, ensuring that their leadership, cultural knowledge, and lived realities inform every legal strategy. This model enables IRF to support legal actions that are both contextually grounded and institutionally rigorous.  

Our legal strategies are developed through the integration of Indigenous knowledge systems, legal experience, and insights from leading environmental and legal research. These elements together shape how we assess structural threats such as land degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change, and how we construct legal responses that are both evidence-based and culturally anchored.  

To sustain this mission, IRF works to secure long-term funding partnerships. These include collaborations with institutional funders, public and private sector actors, philanthropists, businesses, mission-aligned investors and crowdfunding. By connecting Indigenous legal work with sustainable capital sources, we help ensure that rights protection is not only possible but durable.  

This structure allows IRF to support legal cases and strategies that create both immediate impact and long-term legal and institutional shifts. Through this foundation, we contribute to the strengthening of global framework for Indigenous rights and environmental justice.