Approach
The Collaborative for Right Relations' work builds the willingness, commitment and practices for centering kinship – kinship with our homelands and among the diverse stewards of our lands and waters – helping our homelands thrive while simultaneously facilitating systems-level transformations.
​
We invite you to join us on this journey to stepping into right relations.
​
In the spirit of collaboration, projects are co-designed and co-created with the people they are meant to serve. The starting point is people who believe we need to be stepping into more diverse ways of knowing and more diverse coalitions of land and water stewards, people want to be on a journey towards right relations.
​Each group has different needs, the work generally aims to:
build new networks of relationships and interconnected support
build capacity, including knowledge, skills, shared understandings and insights
support high-leverage actions
hold space for exploration, coming together, collaboration and transformation
Successful approaches to achieving these create a rhythm of individual and collective preparation to come together, gatherings to dive deeply into themes, and support to advance commitments and apply insights. While this will look differently for different groups, below are two offerings that have worked well when woven together.
Learning Journey
A multi-month learning journey for a group of environmental leaders across multiple teams and states built knowledge, capacity and new practices to enable partnership; it facilitated conversations to recognize and begin to remedy patters of power imbalances; and it built relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples committed to a shared future.
The learning journey paired new knowledge with new ways of learning and immersive time with culture bearers and knowledge holders. Working groups emerged to design and implement projects to break old patterns and support Indigenous priorities around keystone species. The learning journey built readiness, catalyzed changes in practice and led to new initiatives, projects and partnerships.
Collaboratives
These facilitated collaborations are a place where Indigenous Peoples and western conservation practitioners can design, pilot and adopt new practices that advance equity, bring together Indigenous and western science and land- and water- care practices, and center relationship and responsibility to home. These are platforms for shared prioritization, experimentation and the creation of new initiatives.
​
Investing in the readiness of cohorts to collaborate is often key to making sure a Collaborative is capacity building, not burdening, and advances true priorities.