ABOUT US
We are a nonprofit founded Ecuador, one of the most biodiverse countries in South America and the world.
We believe that there's a really powerful way out of the environmental mess that we created, but it relies on us regular humans to act like a beautifully synchronized ensemble of drummers.
Humans for Abundance was founded with the purpose of bringing us all together to participate in the biggest clean-up family party that ever existed. A family party, that’s right. After all, this is what Latin Americans do best, right?
Why not create a get-together to fix what we broke?
We do this all the time in Latin America. We call them “mingas” and they come from the indigenous tradition of working in solidarity amongst friends and neighbors.
We believe that if we leave the doom and gloom story aside and see ourselves as one big human family, everybody could chip in with their available resources to lend a hand.
As a family, we could quickly restore and protect our carbon-sinking ecosystems, rescue our soils, clean up water pollution and achieve everything else we can think of related to a healthy environment.
And why not bask in the wonderful feelings of comradery, contribution, and collective enjoyment while we are at it, as if we were all drumming to the same song?
Guilt and fear are not serving us. Let’s try joy and hope for once.
Maybe changing collective human behavior quickly and at a large scale is not possible, but like most crazy projects, we have a healthy disregard for the impossible.
OUR MISSION
To restore and conserve the planet's ecosystems and biodiversity by empowering humans who can take real, concrete actions that have large-scale positive environmental and social impact.
OUR TEAM
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CHOCHI ITURRALDE
Executive Director
DANIEL BRYAN
Director of Community Education
OMAR TELLO
Forest Restoration Expert
PAULA ITURRALDE
Head Scientist and Restoration Manager
H4A is a program run by FUNDACION PACHAYSANA who partners with local restorers in marginalized communities.
We chose this model because social enterprises are proving to have a greater and more positive impact in the world and they are slowly becoming a powerful way to use business as a force for good. The systems that governments have created in the name of economic growth can be used by organizations like ours to grow rapidly and redistribute economic resources in a different, more equitable way.
Our approach uses current technology to create a network for collaboration between humans from all over the world.
Using this approach we can:
1. support underrepresented people from the global south by giving recognition to their identities and ways of life and supporting them in reawakening ancestral ways of living within their ecosystems.
We amplify their voices, act as translators, and facilitate their connection with people from other parts of the world. We can be the bridge where they exchange resources, knowledge, and services while maintaining their native or local language and customs.
We move power from the center to the margins instead of forcing the underrepresented to acculturate to the center.
2. provide a concrete and impactful way for people from the global north to fight climate change and biodiversity loss by opening up a bridge that connects them with the millions of hands that live in key ecosystems.
Western systems have pushed city-dwellers into a position where it is almost impossible to care for nature. Our habits of consumption have taken hold of everything we do, from the way we eat, to the way we socialize, from the way we educate our kids in schools to the way we build our buildings and houses.
We provide people who are worried about climate change a way to restore vital ecosystems without having to leave their jobs, move to a different country, buy land, learn all the skills needed to help a habitat regain balance, or do all the intense work needed to restore a forest, river, or wetland back into life.