The creative, entertainment and music worlds are banding together to raise donations for the Amazon Emergency Fund, which supports indigenous communities and organizations in the Amazon basin who are facing threats from the COVID-19 pandemic, via a star-studded global livestream event.
Taking place Thursday, May 28, at 5 p.m. PST/8 p.m. EST, the online benefit, dubbed the Artists United For Amazonia: Protecting The Protectors, will feature celebrities, activists and scientists from across various industries, including Carlos Santana, Peter Gabriel, Jane Fonda, Morgan Freeman, famed primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall and Brazilian environmental and indigenous activist and politician Sônia Guajajara, among many others.
Hosted by "Game Of Thrones" actress Oona Chaplin, the livestream benefit will also feature "living-room musical performances, interviews, and calls to action," with confirmed performers including Herbie Hancock, Rocky Dawuni, Butterscotch Clinton, Brazilian GRAMMY nominee Ivan Lins and Brazilian GRAMMY winner Luciana Souza, Deadline reports. Other guests and participants include Kali Uchis, Chloe Smith from Rising Appalachia, Wade Davis and many others.
The livestream will be available via the event's website and Facebook page.
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Launched last month, according to Deadline, the Amazon Emergency Fund raises and channels "resources to indigenous communities and grassroots organizations who face the COVID-19 emergency in the entire Amazon basin," according to a press release.
The fund's website states that "100% of each donation will go directly to Indigenous and Forest Communities and Organizations facing COVID-19 in the Amazon Rainforest." The fund will support Rapid Response Grants to provide services including: urgent COVID-19 prevention and care, food and medical supplies, emergency communications and evacuation, and more.
The Amazon Emergency Fund is accepting donations now.
Read: Recording Academy And MusiCares Establish COVID-19 Relief Fund
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the Amazon Basin, the virus has killed 25 indigenous people in the rainforest and surrounding remote villages and more than 100 people in urban areas, according to The New York Times.
"As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the Amazon Basin, it threatens the lives and the future of indigenous peoples and traditional forest communities, the Guardians of the Forest," the Amazon Emergency Fund website states. "These populations are disproportionately vulnerable to contracting the illness due to the persistent lack of access to equal and adequate public services, such as housing and health care, and the consequences of centuries of colonization and racism.
"For over 500 years, indigenous peoples of the Amazon and across the Americas have faced invasions and loss of their ancestral territories, ethnic and socioeconomic discrimination, and the constant threat of physical and cultural extermination resulting in displacement, disease, and genocide. Now, indigenous peoples – particularly the elders, wisdomkeepers and those living in voluntary isolation – are gravely at risk by the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditional forest communities are similarly threatened, including riverine, quilombola, rubber-tappers, and other extractive populations, who have been defending the forest with their lives."
