our approachWe serve at the intersection of conservation, Indigenous stewardship, sustainable community development, and complex systems change.
Real progress can't be rushed,
and it can't be done alone.
Drawing on our unique experience, our approach builds the trust, clarity, and shared commitments needed to work successfully together over the long term. Style
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Place-grounded
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Engaging power and history
Working directly with the realities shaping collaboration
Engaging power and history
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High-leverage
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Partnership-centered
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Weaving Indigenous and Western Stewardship
Bringing complementary strengths to address environmental and social challenges
Weaving Indigenous and Western Stewardship
The Collaborative for Right Relations engages complex systems
Building the enabling conditions for transformation by expanding shared knowledge, insight, commitment, and capacity.
Weaving cross-system relationships and commitments that build agency and trust, empower key change agents, and strengthen networks.
Incubating concrete initiatives and collaborations that model new standards of practice.
Shifting structures and norms by catalyzing diverse teams to remove barriers, shift policies, change practices, improve decision-making processes, and establish new resource flows.
Our beliefs
The environmental and social challenges we face are interconnected. This moment needs us ALL to step into right relationship with the lands, waters, and communities that care for us.
To meet these challenges, we must harness our distinct wisdom, commitment, and responsibilities to create the foundation for a shared and thriving future.
Western and Indigenous practices bring important and complementary strengths, and yet, partnership efforts often falter due to barriers rooted in worldview, history, power, institutional habits, and the structures and systems that prioritize speed and control.
Relationships - to each other and to the lands and waters that care for us - shape how energy flows through systems and are a key leverage point.
The Collaborative for Right Relations works to transform the cycles of environmental degradation and exclusion of Indigenous Peoples, creating instead systems driven by all people's relationships with and responsibility to the lands and waters that care for us. We operate within the organizational ecosystem, targeting the deep dynamics that hold stuck systems in place.
“The Collaborative for Right Relations and Erin Myers Madeira stand as allies in restoring balance, uplifting Indigenous leadership, and honoring the knowledge-keepers of our People. Their partnership continues to hold space for the Tribe’s teachings to be shared with future generations in right relationships with land, community, and ancestors.”
- Indigenous Leader
“In other spaces, I sense people are trying to fix us or change us. I don’t sense this with this group…It doesn’t come from the brain, it comes from a connection with sacred values.”
- Indigenous Leader
Our FoundationsThe Collaborative for Right Relations is guided by the leaders, organizations and Indigenous Peoples who have walked this path before us.
The following frameworks are foundational to how we seek to catalyze systems-level change:
Enduring transformation requires us to develop and continually embody shared values of inter-reliance that we can individually, organizationally, and collectively enact and hold ourselves accountable to.
We transform complex systems by focusing on points of high-leverage to establish structures, patterns and behaviors that create positively reinforcing cycles.
North America’s oldest models of treaty-making guide us in how to collaborate across cultures and knowledge systems to ground in our values and step into shared space with Indigenous Peoples in ways that honor Indigenous identity and uphold peace, friendship, and respect.