The Koyaanisqatsi Trust is a brand new charitable trust, established to provide resilient, peer to peer funding and expertise to grassroots, environmentally conscious people and projects, in both the UK and abroad.
Koyaanisqatsi is an ancient Hopi Indian word, meaning “world out of balance.” Known as the “peaceful ones,” the Hopi’s apocalyptic mythology describes a “state of living which calls for another way.”
“If we dig precious things from the land,
we will invite disaster” – Hopi prophecy
Today, the Koyaanisqatsi Trust recognises that our existing pattern of living is fundamentally destructive and immanently unsustainable. Through a network of affiliated fund raising initiatives, the Trust will help to inspire and build new models of social enterprise and community focused positive action, which are not-for-profit.
We will soon be inviting applications from people and projects who could benefit from small grants, support and guidance. Our objects include:
- To empower individuals to participate in educational activities which promote social entrepreneurship, build resilience and enable sustainability, through the provision of grants or bursaries.
- To facilitate the development of sustainable and resilient communities by social investment in the start up or growth of social enterprises and community projects.
- To promote non-political causes and campaigns, including provisions of grants or bursaries to support creativity and creative expression.
The Koyaanisqatsi Trust is inspired by the seminal film Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of balance, created by Godfrey Reggio and Phillip Glass between 1975 and 1982. The film, which was ground breaking in its use of slow motion and time lapse cinematography and contained no dialogue or vocalised narration, is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds — urban life and technology versus the environment.
“There seems to be no ability to see beyond, to see that we have encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has remarkably replaced the original, nature itself.
We do not live with nature any longer; we live above it, off of it as it were. Nature has become the resource to keep this artificial or new nature alive.” – Godfrey Reggio
