Equity and Sustainability Consulting

03/28/2026

Supporting Existing Leadership
Communities have long been working to save themselves, and they have leaders that have been uplifting community priorities. Driven by their connections and cultures, they have shared resources and knowledges to advance their collective resilience. They need to be supported, especially since they have often faced lack of resources, training, and funding, but they have been advancing the work nonetheless.

Organizations should work to avoid replicating, competing for funding, and taking over efforts. This often happens because it is easier for bigger organizations that often have more resources to qualify for opportunities. It is important to find and collaborate with the community leaders that have long been leading local change. This helps with ensuring that programs better respond to community needs.

03/28/2026

Equity work has long been based on and inspired by the work of community organizers and leaders, the people that have been working to make their communities better. They have been innovating models for healing our communities and environments, most often without enough resources and with important impacts.

That is why equity and sustainability work needs to also center community leaders. Often, they will not have fancy titles or accreditations. However, their work is grounded in their communities and can provide important guidance on better supporting them to uplift local needs. They also have essential insight for engaging communities when they face many barriers to participation. Collaborating with local leaders can help ensure impactful programs.

03/28/2026

It is important to remember that when we talk about equity, equitable engagement is necessary. Communities are involved in co-creating solutions. This entails actively working to include diverse and marginalized people that have not been included before to participate and lead in decision making.

Equitable engagement means equitable collaboration or empowerment, and the pathway to equity is equitable collaboration. It is about co-creating solutions, and if we start leading solutions with that framework, we can really integrate equity from the start.

03/18/2026

Sometimes people think that people of color do not care about or experience nature because they think we do not go to national parks and forests. However, many people of color, if not all people, have ancestral and cultural ties to nature even if they may not be able to travel as much to public lands. They often are separated by a few generations from land-based lifestyles and traditions.

Outdoor experiences and environmentalism are not just doing extravagant and pricey outdoor adventures although they are quite fun. We have to remember that nature is everywhere, and it can be enjoyed everywhere. Nature is right outside of our doorsteps, if not inside our homes too. Nature is who we are. Nature is the grass at our feet, the birds chirping as we walk. It can be enjoyed and cared for anywhere!

03/18/2026

When people think about how they connect with nature, they often do not think about how our relationships are reciprocal. This means that our relationships are circular, we impact nature, and nature impacts us.

We have many relationships with nature, and they are all reciprocal. The relationships never just go one way. We can think about the food we eat, even if we do not grow it, our choices to purchase it, mean that nature nourishes us. It also means that our purchase options support certain land practices. Remembering this will help us have better impacts on nature and our communities.

03/18/2026

It is important for us to honor our social-ecological relationships for advancing a more just and sustainable future. We need to value how we interact with and benefit from nature through our social-ecological relationships, so we can protect it.

Nature feeds us. It gives us beauty. It teaches us. It lets us have fun. Nature does a lot for us. The more we recognize and honor that, the more we can value and protect it. If we do not conserve nature, our main social-ecological relationships will continue to be threatened. We need nature. We are nature.

03/18/2026

Collaboration is essential to advancing equitable sustainability. As we work towards equitable engagement and better supporting diverse communities and programs, it is very important to think about this work in regards to relationships because that should always be the goal.

We need to center people in the long term because if efforts are just trying to recruit people to a program, that is not really equitable engagement. Equitable engagement is in essence equitable collaboration; it means that we are thinking about how we are going to work long-term with communities. It is actually about doing more than just working together, but building together, making solutions together.

This is the best way to create equitable programs and have community-driven efforts in sustainability because when the communities are involved from the start, the programs are better structured to support their priorities, address their barriers, and advance their visions for healing our social-ecological relationships.

03/18/2026

We all live in social-ecological systems. Our cities and nature are social-ecological systems. This means that our ecological systems are intricately connected to our social systems, and Western science has increasingly recognized this in the past decades. However, Indigenous, marginalized, and environmental justice communities from throughout the world have already known this.

In order to advance solutions that can transform our systems for a more just and sustainable future, we need to heal our social-ecological relationships. This first begins with understanding what social-ecological relationships our communities maintain and working to conserve our environments from continual climate, exploitation, degradation, development, and transformation threats.

06/16/2025

¡Hola! Me llamo Katia Pilar Carranza y soy una Embajadora Semilla de La Celebración de las Áreas Protegidas, Conservadas y su Gente. Me enfoco en representar los valores y objetivos de La Celebración en México. Mis responsabilidades se centran en gestionar y promover las celebraciones, crear alianzas con los sistemas de áreas protegidas, facilitar el acceso a oportunidades estratégicas de capacitación, y sistematizar información clave sobre las celebraciones.

La Celebración de las Áreas Protegidas, Conservadas y su gente, es un proceso anual que integra a diversos sectores, niveles, generaciones, géneros y culturas en un proceso anual y colaborativo, para la valorización e incidencia de los actores clave en la conservación efectiva.

Celebración Áreas Protegidas

07/10/2024

🙂Registration open!
🏞️National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Training, (free virtual training)
💻July 15-16th, 2024, 11:00 am-1:00 pm, MT
🌐 Register at www.nafws.org/events-training/

07/10/2024