COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND

CELDF seeks to engage - through education, training and legal assistance - with community partners to enact local measures and organize profile-raising campaigns that assist global efforts in building self-governing, anti-racist Earth-centered cultures while also supporting efforts to directly dismantle the key forces destabilizing society and the planet.

Through education and outreach, organizing assistance, and legal support, CELDF amplifies and empowers local voices to confront the legal barriers to sustainability, justice, and equity. We provide the tool kit for communities to expand their rights, allow them to make decisions about their health, economy, and environment through local self-governance, or Community Rights

CELDF has helped close to two hundred communities in ten states. Our Community Organizers have formed Community Rights Networks in 5 states; organizing efforts are taking root in 6 other states. In collaboration with our network we are seeing the fruits of a national community rights movement – a movement catalyzed by the growing recognition that “we the people” lack the legal authority to decide what happens in our own communities.

CELDF has realized many milestones through the years. We assisted Tamaqua Borough pass the first Rights of Nature law in the US; we assisted Ecuador draft the first Rights of Nature Language drafted into its national constitution; and we continue to assist communities, such as Lincoln County Oregon, Toledo, Ohio, and Nottingham New Hampshire in their quest for Community Rights and Rights of Nature legislation.
As we begin our 26th year, CELDF is eager to work with communities to solve problems and expand their rights, including the authority to enact minimum wage increases, public education reform, civil rights expansions and sustainable policies that would forge a more just and equitable society. We will continue to lead in advancing the Rights of Nature; the idea that the earth and its ecosystems should not just be property in the eyes of the law, but instead have basic rights like the right to exist and flourish.