Bustan is a grassroots, nonprofit environmental justice organization that works with Bedouin, the indigenous population of the Middle East. In the Negev, southern Israel, approximately 76,000 Bedouin live in over 45 Unrecognized Villages. This means they are considered squatters and do not receive the most rudimentary services such as health care, electricity, access roads, water, sewage, and educational access.. About 5,000 Bedouins live in Wadi el Na’am, sandwiched in between a toxic waste incinerator, 19 hazardous chemical factories at Ramat Hovav, and the munitions factory at Ramat Bekah, in addition to the high-voltage pylons of the Israel Electric Company that cross their village. All of this infrastructure was established around the village decades after the El Azazme Bedouin were forcibly relocated in the 1950s. Bustan gathered hundreds of volunteers from around the world to build a straw-bale, solar-powered, medical clinic with the villagers to promote fair allocation of public resources to all citizens. Recently, the Minister of Health released an epidemiological study indicating there is 65% higher rates of mortality for those 350,000 Jewish and Arab citizens living within a 20km radius of Ramat Hovav. The Bedouin villagers live 2km from this site. They need additional funds to purchase medical supplies to sustain the clinic and plant a traditional garden surrounding the clinic.

This project is a Jewish/Bedouin collaborative sponsored by Bustan L’Shalom to build the Negev Bedouin Sustainable Learning Site. This project serves over 900 youth from the Abu Tlul School of the unrecognized village of Negev. The goal is to create a replicable model for a sustainable learning site that provides knowledge and tools for environmental and cultural preservation. It allows for a renewal of healthy desert ecology by combining traditional Bedouin concepts of stewardship and appropriate modern technologies. The site includes a vegetable garden and orchard. It uses renewable wind energy to carry water from a renovated well to sustain the irrigation system for the orchard and the school. The site serves as a community center as well as a living classroom for the school.

This project provided a means for the Mayan women in rural communities of Chiapas, Mexico to form their own economic cooperatives. Many of these women have no access to education and are impoverished. Through the creation of their own cooperatives, they learned to value their own creative skills and to manage their own financial resources. The funding allowed the women of one community to purchase two sewing machines and the materials needed to produce clothing and decorative pieces such as tablecloths, napkins, and pillows. Not only did this provide an affordable way for these women to clothe their own families, but it gave them the opportunity to sell their excess goods in nearby community markets, thereby improve their family income and the vitality of their villages. Through this project, mothers teach their daughters the value and strength of economic independence.