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What we do

As allies and project consultants we offer an innovative and customizable toolkit to expand dynamic space for negotiated knowledge.  Working within both new and existing projects, our approach advances community leadership and elevates holistic understandings of biocultural diversity.

At each step, we work with our partners to ensure that the skills and insights supporting these frameworks are transferable, replicable and scalable and that they meet local contexts and adapt to community-defined challenges and aspirations.

Working collectively, we aim to bolster your organization or community's efforts to respond to advancing climate disruption,  biocultural decline, and denaturing economies of scale.
Reach out and start a conversation with us about how we might
collaborate to support your efforts.
Island Reach Foundation is a registered charitable 501c3 organization.



















"If you've come here to help me, you are wasting your time.  But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together"

Queensland Aboriginal Rights Group













could your project use support to meet its aspirations for grassroots mobilization?

Whether you're a civil society organization working to achieve a UN Sustainable Development Goal or Aichi Biodiversity target, a community based organization conserving a territory of life or rewilding a habitat, or a network of activists working for climate leadership and justice, Island Reach’s modular framework can help generate creative options able to advance equitable community leadership, inclusive sustainability, and scalability of your existing or upcoming project.

Island Reach offers a range of programs aimed at making contemporary understandings of Third space problem solving, agroecology, alternative economies, and biocultural diversity accessible and practical in contexts of rapid social and environmental changes globally.

Our engagements can be customized to meet the needs and time-frame of your organization and community partners and range from brief undertakings, covering participatory design in the Ethical space, to longer partnerships working with project implementation and then activity scaling:

(Phase 1) Diversity in Design: Through a series of workshops, mapping exercises, targeted role-play and reflection, (participatory methods) actors become equipped to facilitate knowledge brokering in a Third or Ethical space — as it concerns their specific project related to, for example,  agroecology, livelihoods and markets, and other biocultural components. We enhance navigating as a team to identify key externalities  that may have been ignored, marginalized or exploited and encounter them as resources.   Our collective objective is to give rise to a new arena of converging narratives and participatory value-webs vital to creating local adaptive resilience responsive to current pressures.

(Phase 2) Sustainability in Action:  In the second phase IR deepens technical support and skill building activities between civil society and community partners as these directly relate to their project.  This work centrally concerns identifying and then integrating  biocultural externalities into local actions such as  agroecological practices, building value-webs for resilient livelihoods, conservation efforts, adaptation and well-being initiatives.  In many cases this involves livelihood and trading practices strengthening and diversifying through transitioning value-chains into more collectivist and resilient value-webs.  Such work thrives within community-led critical reflection and local Participatory Action Research and is neither static nor fixed, but rather is an ongoing dynamic process which privileges local sovereignty and choice. 

(Phase 3) Scaling for Collective Action:  In this phase IR works with partners to craft a networking module to enhance the potential for scalability and broader impact. Such work draws on a Movement of Movements logic in that local efforts to respond to advancing climate disruption,  biocultural decline, and denaturing economies of scale will go further by avoiding fragmentation. This phase supports creating conditions to share experiences and mobilize more people to enact transformative visions and practices. In Ethical space this involves building solidarity and amplifying reciprocity across difference and distance, recognizing and enhancing local innovation and self-determination.  Working collectively to build strategic story-telling with partners and crafting films-for-impact are a couple of ways IR can support outreach and networking.


















"I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an indigenous world view -- stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice....  For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your child's future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended upon it."

Robin Wall Kimmerer, mother, scientist, author, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation










Island Reach assets

  • Agile participatory process and conflict theory knowledge gained from advanced professional training in Cultural Anthropology, Cross-cultural Analytic Psychology, Global Health, Critical Theory, and Human Ecology.

  • Field experience working as allies, facilitators, and liaisons with Indigenous partners, local communities, civil society, and government on applied projects, including coral reef restoration, integrated farming systems, community-managed conservation areas, local artisanal economies, and climate activism.

  • Biocultural entrepreneurial expertise developing sustainable markets and artisanal value chains that become "value webs" grounded in agroecological principles, practices and the economics of local sovereignty.

  • Documentary film work and a focus on the power of storytelling to facilitate peer-to-peer networking, share lessons learned, bolster collective action, and build mutual recognition and reciprocity across difference and distance.

  • Pragmatic, experiential knowledge having sustained our personal livelihood as artisanal forest harvesters in one particular market-space of ideas and actions for 25 years.












"The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control.  Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace."

Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.”

Vandana Shiva
Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, and anti-globalization author









Some examples of
Island reach activities...
Backing environmental leaders in conservation management plans, climate adaptation, and resilient livelihoods

Supporting women's alliance, participation, and leadership in conservation actions and climate adaptation
Amplifying integrative value-webs and agroecology practices to bolster food sovereignty
Knowledge brokering and mobilization with partners: working between and across knowledge systems
Advocating for recognition and reciprocity across distance and difference to stimulate processes of intellectual, emotional, and ethical decolonization in responding to the climate crisis
... and educational outreach through presentations, workshops, and writing.

Contact us





















"Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."

Paulo Freire, Brazilian Educator and Philosopher








A few words about Third  (Ethical) Space...

Partnerships and alliances for conservation, development, adaptation, and activism bring to the foreground challenges of intersecting local and Indigenous knowledge systems and Western knowledge systems.   To engage, IR teams lean heavily on post-colonial, Indigenous,  psychoanalytic, & human ecology thoughts and practice alongside creative participatory methods to animate a dynamic, intermediary space for getting work done, often called "Third space" or, in some cases, "Ethical space".

This hybrid relational space is often one of colliding worldviews with complex histories, personal experience,and powerful contingencies enfolded, contested, and directly impacting the concrete project at hand—for better or worse.  IR activities illuminate such challenging yet creative spaces, sites of difference, negotiation and convergence, to help communities respond with resilience to advancing climate disruption,  biocultural decline, and denaturing economies of scale.






"The idea of an ethical space is initially conceptualized by the unwavering construction of difference and diversity between human communities. These are the differences that highlight uniqueness because each entity is moulded from a distinct history, knowledge tradition, philosophy, and social & political reality...  Poole directs our focus to that space and invites us to reflect on the electrifying nature of that area between entities that we thought was empty."

Willie J Ermine, Sturgeon Lake First Nation scholar amplifying work of polyglot literary theorist Roger Poole






















Reach out to us and start a conversation about how
we might work together to support your efforts.

Contact

contact@islandreach.org
1-413-337-8301
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