Alliance for Felix Cove
About The Alliance for Felix Cove
Coast Miwok/Tamal-ko people stewarded lands that are now part of California’s Point Reyes National Seashore for over 10,000 years. But over the last century and a half, colonial powers have attempted to erase that history by removing the last Coast Miwok/Tamal-ko people from their ancestral home. The Alliance for Felix Cove was created to combat that injustice–and to protect, restore and rematriate the ancestral homelands of the Coast Miwok/Tamal-ko people. Founded by Theresa Harlan, a descendant of the last family to live freely on Coast Miwok/Tamal-ko lands, the Alliance is part of a movement to restore Indigenous connections to ancestral lands as a pathway to healing and renewal for future generations.
Challenges and Opportunities
During its first year, the Alliance created a wave of new attention around the attempted erasure of Coast Miwok/Tamal-ko history–and the vital importance of reclaiming access to their ancestral homelands. But to truly realize its mission, the Alliance recognized they would need to expand their capacity significantly by creating strong operations strategies, growing their team, and implementing systems to ensure sustainability and impact in the coming years. Through Emergence’s partnership with the Kalliopeia Foundation, the Alliance partnered with our team to help them transform their vision and early successes into a plan for long-term growth.
Approach
Our team worked closely with the Alliance to define a set of clear and powerful objectives that would each support the broader organizational mission of rematriation: to advocate for access to ancestral land; to share the true history of Coast Miwok/Tamal-ko people; and to preserve and honor cultural and ecological traditions and pathways. We then supported the Alliance in creating fundraising and communications plans that each outline strategies and tactics to take measurable steps toward their goals. A key part of those plans was identifying the additional capacity and staff the Alliance would need to realize its mission–and creating the systems and infrastructure to deepen the Alliance’s impact, now and into the future.
Impact
Today the Alliance is emerging as a leader in the growing movement to return Indigenous lands into Indigenous hands. Working alongside our team at Emergence, the Alliance is deepening its existing partnerships and identifying prospects for new funders that align with its vision of Indigenous power and rematriation; lifting up powerful communications strategies to reclaim Indigenous narratives; and actively expanding its team and infrastructure to be able to fully realize its mission of reindigenzing ancestral lands. Through this work, the Alliance is bringing awareness to the resilient legacy of past generations of Coast Miwok/Tamal-ko people–and building a community of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous supporters. Today the Alliance is standing alongside Indigenous people across the Americans to reaffirm ancestral relationships with public lands and recognize and heal from intergenerational trauma.