Maude Barlow Awarded Cultural Freedom Fellowship

June 2, 2005

The Lannan Foundation has awarded Maude Barlow a two-year “Cultural Freedom Fellowship,” in recognition of her outstanding work on fighting the threats that globalization poses to the world’s fresh water.

The fellowship is a cash award to encourage and support leaders in American and foreign communities to contemplate, reflect, write and study, and then to use the knowledge gained to more effectively communicate with and educate the general public. The Lannan Foundation defines cultural freedom as the right of individuals and communities to define and protect valued and diverse ways of life currently threatened by globalization.

The Foundation announced this year’s recipients (five in total) in a full-page ad in the New York Times on June 2, 2005.

“These fellowship recipients are inspiring examples of the kinds of people who keep hope alive, who again and again remind us of the necessity to struggle always for freedom and cultural diversity,” according to foundation president J. Patrick Lannan, Jr. in announcing the awards.

Maude will be using this fellowship to further her work to protect the world’s water for people and nature for generations to come. In particular, she will be using part of the fellowship to support important local water struggles in the developing world. Maude has recently returned from a trip to El Alto, Bolivia where she worked with local communities that are protesting the private company that has taken over the local water supply for failing to deliver on its promise to provide water to 200,000 of El Alto’s poorest residents.

Over the past few years, Maude has also worked with groups in Orange Farm, South Africa, Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Plachimada, India. Maude also worked with groups in Uruguay, supporting an historic referendum campaign in which the people of Uruguay voted by a two-thirds majority to amend their constitution to declare water as a human right and calling for all water services to be delivered publicly, not by private companies. She is currently one of the leaders of an international movement to have the right to water recognized in a UN Treaty.

Maude Barlow is National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and has long been a crusader for the public good. Women’s rights. Free trade. Globalization. Human rights. Social programs. There isn’t a current issue that she has not met with determination, conviction and a deep sense of justice. She has been awarded six honorary doctorates from Canadian universities. The Lannan Foundation fellowship is a tribute to her lifelong activism.

The Lannan Foundation is a family foundation based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity, through projects that support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, as well as inspired Native activists in rural indigenous communities. Understanding that globalization threatens all cultures and ecosystems, the foundation is particularly interested in projects that encourage freedom of inquiry, imagination, and expression.

 

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