When Funds Follow Wisdom: Liz Hosken’s Journey with Flow Funding
- mia8893
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 6 minutes ago
Be The Earth’s Flow Funding Programme shifts power by trusting visionary leaders and grassroots activists to directly allocate resources where they’re most needed — guided by lived experience, local wisdom, and intuition. It’s a human-centred, trust-based approach to philanthropy, that bypasses bureaucracy and uplifts overlooked communities.
Liz Hosken is one of our current Flow Funding Wisdom Keepers, and embodies this philosophy.
Born in South Africa and active in both environmental and anti-apartheid movements from a young age, she co-founded The Gaia Foundation over 35 years ago. Since then, she has championed Indigenous knowledge, ecological justice and Earth-centred leadership — creating spaces for communities to protect their lands, cultures and futures. Liz’s lifelong work illustrates the heart of Flow Funding: resourcing wisdom at the roots.
She shared her 2025 Flow Funding experience with us.
In this time of great transition, what do you feel called to steward?
I have known our Earth would face huge challenges if the Industrial Growth Economy did not change course since I was a teenager, as did many, especially Indigenous leaders. We are now living that time when things are unravelling from macro to micro level.
Joanna Macy has been a mentor for many of us who feel called to contribute to the healing of our world and has helped us to find ways to navigate this time.
She encouraged us to witness the pain, not turn away, knowing that it was our love of the world that enabled us to feel the pain. She taught us a way to honour our pain, breathing it through and connecting with the gratitude and care we feel for the beauty of life that is. This practice helps me to come back to what I feel called to steward, however small it might feel amidst the enormity of the challenges we face.
The more I feel the need to listen deeply to what ‘life’ or Mother Earth is calling for: as a living sentient being who has her own self-regulating capacity. I ask myself, as a cell in her body, how can I be aligned with her self-healing processes.
This requires me to cultivate a greater capacity to use all my senses to hear – seeing, feeling, intuiting with my heart-mind.
I am grateful to be working with other humans who are also cultivating their ‘porousness’ to hear, and with Indigenous elders in various communities whose traditions are rooted in deep listening to the land and the ancestors.
I draw comfort from the chemist Prigogine who said:
“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
Could you share a Flow Funding experience that felt especially meaningful or transformative for you?
Just after receiving the Flow Funds from Be The Earth this March, I returned to Brazil after many years – delayed due to COVID amongst other reasons. The timing felt meaningful and I was open to what might emerge to flow into.
There were many meaningful moments in this journey. The one which felt especially poignant was visiting the Ashaninka Apiwtxa community living on the Amônia river in Acre. They were the first Indigenous community I met when I visited the Amazon in 1988.
At the time, they were enslaved by loggers who were cutting down their forest and they were trapped, not knowing how they could stop this onslaught. After days of dialogue, we developed a plan for them to free themselves, including legal support and a boat for them to get their own supplies and to sell their products to generate some income.
Within a few years the loggers were expelled and they then began to work on demarcating, regenerating, and defending their territory.
When I arrived this year it was an emotional encounter. I had not seen Chief Antonio and Dona Piti, his wife, since 1995 — although I had been working with some of their children, now strong leaders, since then. The community gathered and Moises the Shaman son recounted the story of what happened in the 80’s and what had transpired. They were now a strong community and their forest was regenerated.
They were working with neighbouring communities to build a forest peoples alliance for protecting this area.
However the threat was now coming from Peru, they said, where the headwaters of many of the rivers the Apiwtxa community depend on are located. The Peruvian government is enabling road building, logging, mining and drug cartels to operate in this area. Most of their Ashaninka relatives live in this area of Peru and are very vulnerable — as the Apiwtxa community had been all those years ago. They felt they needed to find a way to support their relatives.
Last year, some funds had flowed to support one of the Ashaninka communities in Peru to move back to the headwaters so they could protect this sacred area, called Sheshea. It was an arduous journey and once there, they had to attune to the spirit of the place before building their houses and opening their gardens. Now, they are settled they can began the complex process of land titling.
Moises talked profoundly about the need to strengthen spiritual practices and rituals to protect the headwaters and the people and the forest. He said, at this time of enormous disruption of Nature and of humans, we need to deepen our spiritual practices and communion with the land and the spirits of the land.
He had been called to build a spiritual portal in an especially sacred area of forest to do this work. Also as a place where young spiritual leaders could be trained and shamans meet.
He saw that the Sheshea community were taking on a very challenging path to protect the headwaters for many communities including Apiwtxa. He felt that he could support them by bringing them to the portal for a deep emersion into their spiritual practices to restore their strength, train the younger spiritual leaders, and nurture their alliance. In this way, they could go back stronger and feel supported.
The challenge was that their Peruvian relatives were not organised to receive funds to pay for their travel to Brazil; a long and in some places dangerous journey.
As I listened I felt such a sense of déjà vu. All those years ago the Apiwtxa community had been in a similar situation: we found a way. It was no coincidence that I was with them at this moment.
I knew some funds needed to flow to support this next turn of the spiral in protecting this precious region of the Amazon, for which I had such a deep love.
The forest and the people here have a special place in my heart, as the first Indigenous community I met all those years ago, who inspired the path I have followed since.
