Joan Carling is an Indigenous activist from Cordillera, Philippines. She has been working on Indigenous issues at the grassroots to international levels for more than 20 years.
Her field of expertise includes human rights, sustainable development, environment, and climate change, as well as on the principles and application of free prior and informed consent (FPIC).
She was the secretary general of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) – a coalition of 50 Indigenous organisations across Asia, from 2008 to 2016.
Joan was also appointed by the UN ECOSOC as an expert member of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) for 2014-2016. She currently is the executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International (IPRI) and serves as chair for Tenure Facility’s board of directors. In 2024 Joan received the Right Livelihood Laureate award by Right Livelihood.
Nonette is a lawyer, and an expert on Indigenous Peoples' land rights, and natural resources management. Most of her work has been in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, especially in Indonesia, Philippines, Mekong region and Melanesia. Her experience spans for more than 30 years and includes nearly a decade advising the Global Green Grants Fund, several USAID and DFID-UK Natural Resource and Community Forestry Portfolios and the Norwegian Climate and Forest funds, dedicated to Indigenous Peoples and local communities in forest and climate programmes. Over the years, she has consistently helped design and implement funding portfolios for local communities and Indigenous Peoples in the global south. Currently, Nonette is Tenure Facility's executive director, and her work today expands to Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Margaret A. Rugadya is a natural resource economist, rights activist, and scholar, with more than twenty years of continuous contributions to land tenure, resource governance, and gender equity. Currently she serves as Chief programme officer at Tenure Facility. Prior to this role, Margaret served as the global practice leader, on gender, land, and resource tenure at Resource Equity and as a program officer at the Ford Foundation in Kenya. Margaret also coalesced land rights activists, civil society organisations, and rural populations into a countrywide movement for pro-poor land law reforms, benefiting women and rural communities in Uganda. She received two distinguished awards for outstanding contribution to law and policy reforms from the government and civil society organisations in Uganda for this work. Margaret has authored a compelling collection of research papers, journal articles, and book chapters focusing on socio economic groups and fragile property rights. She has designed courses to train government agencies and non-state actors on land and natural resource policies that impact native communities and women. She holds a Ph.D. (Economics) from Maastricht University and a Master of Arts (Sociology) from Makerere University.