After many years of working to ensure a robust and accountable environmental and social safeguard system for international financial institutions, many stakeholders now feel that new and different ways of improving these policies and accountability systems must be considered. Through this grant increase, the Program on International and Comparative Environmental Law at the American University's Washington College of Law will continue its efforts to evaluate current sustainable finance standards, monitor the climate change-related policies of financial institutions, strengthen and use existing accountability systems to support affected communities in specific cases, and seek new approaches to increasing accountability of public and private financial institutions.

The National Alliance of Latin American & Caribbean Communities is a network of community-based organizations led by immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the past grant period, National Alliance of Latin American & Caribbean Communities worked to ensure that there is improved evaluation of the impacts of Inter-American Development Bank's lending and are measures in place to ensure that this bank's investments are "climate-friendly." This renewal grant will continue to support a capacity building program for Latin American and Caribbean immigrants, focused on international financial flows and regional integration.

This general purposes renewal grant will focus on strengthening the Center for Socio-Environmental Support's administrative, operational, and resource mobilization capacity. The Center for Socio-Economic Support is a Brazilian grantmaking and capacity-building organization founded by a group of Brazilian nongovernmental organizations. Its mission is to provide both technical and financial support for the work of community organizations and nongovernmental organizations throughout Brazil and neighboring countries. It supports organizations that monitor environmentally damaging projects; develop coordinated strategies to expand sustainable development options for local communities, and work to make large-scale energy and infrastructure investments more environmentally and socially sustainable.