Alnoba Lewis Family Foundation Recognizes Indigenous and Gender Equity Leaders with Alnoba Environmental Leadership Awards

The Alnoba Lewis Family Foundation, an advocate for social justice, today announced two additional recipients of the 2023 Alnoba Environmental Leadership Awards. The Alnoba International Indigenous Leadership Award will be presented to Celia Xakriabá, Indigenous Representative, Brazil Chamber of Deputies. The recipient of the Alnoba Moment of Truth Award for Leadership for Gender Equity is Ruchira Gupta, Founder, APNE AAP Women Worldwide.

KENSINGTON, N.H., Sept. 13, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The Alnoba Lewis Family Foundation, an advocate for social justice, today announced two additional recipients of the 2023 Alnoba Environmental Leadership Awards. The Alnoba International Indigenous Leadership Award will be presented to Celia Xakriabá, Indigenous Representative, Brazil Chamber of Deputies. The recipient of the Alnoba Moment of Truth Award for Leadership for Gender Equity is Ruchira Gupta, Founder, APNE AAP Women Worldwide.

Each Alnoba Leadership Award includes a $10,000 donation in the recipient's name to the nonprofit of their choice. The awards will be presented at the Alnoba Environmental Leadership Awards Dinner on October 4, 2023.

The Alnoba Environmental Leadership Awards were launched by Harriet and Alan E. Lewis in 2018 to honor daring leaders who have made big strides towards environmental and social justice.

Celia Xakriabá, Indigenous Representative, Brazil Chamber of Deputies
The Alnoba International Indigenous Leadership Award honors an Indigenous leader outside the U.S. who serves as a bold defender of Mother Earth, inspires communities to action and one who honors and applies traditional beliefs to the most pressing environmental problems of our day.

Célia Xakriabá is a teacher, poet, and activist from the Xakriabá people in the Cerrado biome of Brazil. She is one of the founders of the National Association of Ancestral Indigenous Women Warriors (ANMIGA) and a leading member of the Indigenous women's movement in Brazil. She also helped to create the "Reforesting Minds" movement based on Indigenous ancestry and wisdom which advocates for a change in consciousness among the global public about planetary preservation.

Since 2017, Xakriabá has spoken at various conferences and debates at universities in Brazil, promoting, among other things, advancing the status and rights of Indigenous women, land rights, education, and encouraging the revitalization of native languages in Brazil.

Ruchira Gupta, Founder, APNE AAP Women Worldwide
The Alnoba Moment of Truth Award for Leadership for Gender Equity honors an activist leader who had the courage to raise the world's attention to a big issue of our time, and rally allies and resources to make a real and lasting impact.

For more than three decades, Ruchira Gupta has campaigned for a world where no girl or woman is bought or sold. Along with 22 courageous women in prostitution, she founded APNE AAP Women Worldwide, which is a grassroots Indian organization that empowers marginalized girls and women to resist and end sex trafficking. To date, she has helped more than 20,000 women and girls escape prostitution.

While on assignment as a journalist in Nepal, Gupta stumbled upon rows of villages with missing girls and asked the villagers where all the girls were. That question changed her life. She learned that little girls as young as twelve were smuggled across the border and sold into brothels in India. She related the story in a documentary, The Selling of Innocents, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Wanting to do more, she quit journalism and started APNE APP inside the red-light areas of India and began to work with the United Nations all over the world.

I Kick and I Fly is her debut fiction novel based on the true stories that she witnessed and experienced as an activist in APNE AAP. She has been given the French Ordre National du Mérite, Clinton Global Citizen Award, and the UN NGO CSW Woman of Distinction award among other honors for her contribution to the establishment of the UN Trafficking Fund for Survivors, the passage of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act and her grassroots activism with APNE AAP. She has co-written a book with Gloria Steinem, As if Women Matter, and edited two anthologies, River of Flesh and Renu's Letters to Birju Babu.

For more information about Alnoba or the Alnoba Environmental Leadership Awards, visit http://www.alnoba.org.

About Alnoba Lewis Family Foundation
The Alnoba Lewis Family Foundation (ALFF) is dedicated to developing courageous leadership and sustainability models to help change people's lives, create stronger communities and save the earth we share. ALFF is the umbrella organization for Alnoba's public programming, conservation efforts, philanthropic giving, and nonprofit leadership work. ALFF has pledged or donated more than $250 million since 1981. The organization's work is focused on the Lewis family's hometowns of Boston, MA and Kensington, NH and within the global villages where their company, Grand Circle Corporation, travels.

Media Contact

Ann Shannon, Alnoba Lewis Family Foundation, 9788107423, [email protected], www.alnoba.org

SOURCE Alnoba Lewis Family Foundation