Island Reach
Island Reach works with individuals, groups, and small organizations grappling with the polycrisis of climate disruption, biocultural collapse, and damaging economies of scale.
We aim to back and connect people working on the margins of “fundability”-- those seeking creative, transformative, and transgressive alternatives to the status quo.
What we do
Connecting
Island Reach allies with partners to offer resource and support to help build relationships and connection, reducing isolation and the siloing of their efforts. Our approach aims for distributed power, decision-making, and collaboration across unexpected commonalities and vastly different experiences.
Storytelling
Drawing from decades of experience with multi-media storytelling, Island Reach sees the intersection of personal narrative, global impact and other-than-human lenses as essential to telling actionable and practical stories about global environmental collapse and human response.
Collaborating
As an operating foundation, Island Reach is an open platform for activism, volunteerism, mutual aid and art. In addition to small grants, Island Reach provides auspice for "associates" to design projects which we directly support through collaboration, logistics, and administration.
Funding
Island Reach provides resource to those seeking to take action at the fringe of mainstream activism and which may be traditionally considered "unfundable". Our grants are unrestricted, recipient directed and are primarily driven by prior-recipient direction through a "snowball funding" mechanism.
Who We Are Working With in 2025-26
Mutehekau Shipu River Stories: an associate project in Northern Quebec led by Alex Steelhouse, with Connor Steelhouse, examining narratives of legal personhood in conservation.
LAND, WATER, ENERGY: an associate project led by Noy Holland. This special public event featured a live conversation between Bill McKibben (educator, naturalist and author of 20 books on climate change and one of the original organizers of 350.org), and Lisa Schmidt, a Montana rancher working to stop the plan to inject jet fuel wastewater into a major aquifer). The speakers discussed affordable energy and threats to water resources while encouraging attendees to speak up for what they believe in to protect their rights and land. The evening event included a screening of IR documentary, "Lichen Camp - Save our old forests" IR provided technical and creative assistance and financial support.
Atlantic Food Action Coalition: Island Reach served as creative consultant to Atlantic Food Action Coalition in PEI, Canada, and prepared the viewing guide for this documentary on food security. https://atlanticfoodaction.ca/around-the-table-film/
Save Our Old Forests , Nova Scotia Canada: In a storytelling partnership, Island Reach produced the Lichen Camp documentary (on our video page) and provided a small grant for Shoulder to Shoulder action which includes an honorarium for Mi'kmaq Elder Albert Marshall
New documentary series in development. See the first production, "Lichen Camp - Save our old forests" on our video page. SYMPOESIS. Sympoiesis means "making-with", and describes the interdependence and co-creation among different entities or agents.
Mountain Watershed Association: Island Reach is providing a collection of small grants through MWA's Direct Support Fund for activists, artists and conservationists working with the Youghiogheny River in Western Pennsylvania and Maryland.
The Green Curtain Project for Endangered Old-Growth Forests The Green Curtain project mapped a future “Green Curtain” of climate refuges across the US in the summer of 2026 to amplify the voices of old-growth forests through the transformational power of music, writing, and visual art. Island Reach supported this action with a grant.
PELUM Kenya: A storytelling collaboration between IR and PELUM Kenya over a 2 year period. Together, we produced 6 documentaries on agroecology.
Nguna Community Water Project: An associate project led by John Ronneth, IR's former project manager in Vanuatu. This project saw the completion of a water security project on Nguna Island, Vanuatu.
Mi'kmaq Land Defenders: Tqamuoweye'katik, Unama'ki Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq land defenders are claiming unceded land rights in the face of clear cutting.
Dr. Obed Kabanda: Women entrepreneurs are testing a business model for menstrual cup provision in Dedza, Malawi, to address longstanding women’s health needs and plastic waste management. Implemented in coordination with CouldYou?, CEDIL, and Self Help Africa Malawi and with small grant support from Island Reach.
Save West Mabou: Grassroots activists fight the destruction of a provincial park for the installation of a golf course. Mabou, Nova Scotia IR provided grant support
Feel free to contact us for any inquiries or to learn more about our projects and initiatives.
Invest in sites of rupture, help with building rafts:
Resource the minor gesture. Not to make it major. Not to scale up. But to stay with its creativity. Worlds turn on minor keys – even though it may not look like it.
Bayo Akomalafe, on paraphilanthropy