As a small professional international grassroots organization, we pursue our mission with a focus on ALLYSHIP AND SUPPORT, working with communities and groups in the Global South to back local leadership responding to advancing climate disruption, biocultural decline, and denaturing economies of scale. We work within both new and existing projects and at each step, prioritize dialogue with our partners to ensure that any skills and insights we build together meet local contexts and adapt to community-defined challenges and aspirations.

As a small, independent operating foundation run by human ecologists, social scientists, and farmers we are acutely aware that most development and conservation funding remains a top-down, bureaucratic force. Too often, NGOs’ engagements are modeled as "interventions" that overtake local agency, put forth distorted notions of accountability, and fail to establish equity and sustainability.

The perspective and practices of allyship help inform IR’s approach. The concept of allyship refers to an active, consistent commitment to equity and to unlearning and re-evaluating positions of power and privilege in order to operate in solidarity with marginalized groups. It involves building trusting relationships, listening and reflecting critically on how ideas and frameworks do, or do not, advance equity and contribute to local sovereignty, alongside prioritizing community-defined goals and ways to measure and define evidence of change and success.

We recognize that there are many different ways of knowing and being. Knowledge co-creation is characterized by the idea of collective generation of new knowledge drawn from a plurality of existing knowledge : scientific, traditional, Indigenous, farmers’, and women’s, to name a few.

While we have unique skill sets and resources to offer, we also come to learn, and to work with our partners to pursue socially and ecologically accountable pathways forward.

Given these guiding principles, we approach this process as a type of "co-application" in which we may develop project proposals for IR funding together through a series of conversations that identify ways we can assist our partners most effectively and creatively in achieving their goals.