Techniques

Seed saving image courtesy of Amy Bradstreet, Image of children courtesy of R. Bruce McNellie

We are dedicated to a life of service through myriad techniques, community outreach projects, and workshops we host at Wild Earth Stewardship Center. We strive to serve as a multipurpose forum to connect pioneers, teachers, and specialists from around the globe with students and Belizeans alike to share and learn new techniques and skills, and rejuvenate our communities and landscapes to a healthier, more vibrant natural state.

The techniques we draw from stay true to our roots and our dedication to creating positive environmental, social, and economic change from the bottom up, starting with our rainforest land we are so honored to serve as stewards of, our neighboring forest-dependent communities, and local rural and urban towns.  The work we do onsite at the Center enables us to field test, monitor, and analyze these techniques and installation projects to determine best practices and model community installations.   It also allows us to demonstrate and share landscape-scale examples with anyone who visits, host workshops, share and learn environmentally-friendly rainforest management techniques, and many other community revitalization practices.

We strive to provide a constructive, cooperative, trusting environment to develop positive interactions between the Center and local communities.  Our community outreach begins with meeting with interested community members to help us identify and understand their most pressing problems and goals. For any given community project, we form a working group that is tailored to the service or solution required, including appropriate stakeholders from the local community and advisors and specialists from the field.   To create stronger conservation incentives and long-term community benefits, it is critical to include and work with knowledgeable, interested, invested community representatives to help determine what socioeconomic and environmental benefits they think would most benefit their community, and in turn collaboratively design solutions that address these needs realistically.  

We then guide this working group in a participatory process to determine goals and strategies, and collaboratively devise innovative, practical, whole-system designs and integrated solutions to meet the needs of each set of unique project requirements. Through collaborative decision-making, we help individuals and communities analyze and design integrated solutions and plans for anything from turning public spaces into community gardens, building or repairing dilapidated infrastructures, and cleaning up waste sites and other places that may have lapsed in terms of meeting pristine environmental requirements before it is too late. We coordinate with our neighboring rural communities to carry out every single one of our final workshop installations as community improvement projects, as well as to connect interested entrepreneurs with the necessary information and training to help support local, environmentally-friendly microenterprise startups. By coordinating with our workshops we are able to provide environmental assessments, site analysis and land plans, advice on best practices, technological support, and installation of projects that benefit the community.

Because we live and work in the rainforest, we are able to establish a place where we can serve as stewards of a large stretch of rainforest, and offer continued, dedicated support to our neighboring communities to ensure long-term project support and success.    One of the ways we provide ongoing support for our projects is by building strong, lasting networks with local and international experts and stakeholders to share experiences, problem-solve, and continue to develop best practices along the way.

To learn more about the techniques and projects we plan on sharing with our neighboring Belizeans, volunteers, and other visitors at Wild Earth Stewardship Center, please click on a technique or project from the list in the menu bar at the left.  Once we have had the necessary time to organically establish our projects, we will begin to regularly update our website with the data we collect and share regarding what does and does not work in our field projects, community projects, farming test plots, and so on.