Our Projects
Through its extensive global network, GIDT brings leading-edge technology, know-how and best-practices globally to support innovation locally.
Our Current Projects
We are supporting a number of communities in Canada in the following areas:
Champions of Change
Champions of Change Nation Re-Building Program:
The Champions of Change Nation Re-Building Program provides aspiring Indigenous leaders with the opportunity to learn from award-winning Indigenous leaders, businesses and green tech innovators from across Canada and around the world. The program exposes the next generation of Indigenous leaders to the world of opportunities that exist and gives them the confidence and tools to lead their Nation back to enjoying a self-sustaining, thriving and enterprising economy. This is not just an economic development program but a Nation Re-Building program. This program brings together traditional values together with new technologies and innovations for a modern way forward that has roots in a traditional way of thinking. This program is currently being offered to Canadian Indigenous communities.
Nation Re-Building
Garifuna Nation Re-Building:
Self-sustainability is central to the Garifuna belief system, both as a collective and as a people, and is paramount to the continued cultural survival of the Garifuna. We are supporting the Garifuna across five countries in Central America in their Nation Re-Building efforts. We are helping them rebuild localized food security and economic development opportunities with a focus on regenerative agriculture, natural healing remedies and superfood products for the healing and wellbeing of the Garifuna people and society at large.
Creating Life Economies
Sápara Nation Life Economy Project:
The Sápara Nation Life Economy Project is focused on bringing back a self-reliant, thriving and enterprising economy to the Sápara Nation in the Amazon. The aim of this project is to demonstrate that a Life Economy can be created and empowered through a full valuation of real wealth using ecosystem mapping technology, blockchain and modern “green” accounting principles. This will support the preservation and sustainable use of balsa trees and the enhancement of local ecosystems within the Sápara territory, and it will create a fund for the implementation of the Sápara School. In this way, the community will be able to reclaim sovereignty over their true wealth, resources and their future. This project will work as a model to inspire others to shift the human story to one that values all life.
Food Resilience
Food System Resilience Program:
We support Indigenous communities and Nations to re-build resilient food systems that can support healthy and thriving people as well as opportunities for developing green local economies. Through our global network, we are developing a hub of food system expertise to share successes within and between Nations. This program is currently focused in Canada.
Land-Based Learning & Healing Spaces
The Shuar Waimiaku Project: The Sleeping Anaconda
Shuar families of the community of Buena Esperanza have come together to support the economic development and reclamation of their ancestral lands. Through community-based ecotourism, stewardship of sacred plants, medicines, and sacred sites in their territory, they aim to protect their culture as well as lands for future generations through the creation of Wamiaku centre for Healing, Tourism and Cultural Knowledge Sharing. GIDT is helping them preserve their cultural knowledge and ancestral territory, and support their sustainable economic development within the region through alternative development mechanisms such as community-based eco-tourism.
Our Past Projects
Our Advocacy & Policy Work
We continue to advocate for, educate and bring awareness to better ways of working together and bridging the Indigenous and secular ways of knowing. We are currently working on a number of initiatives around reframing the conversation around land management and conservation through the Indigenous lens. We continue to speak at conferences across Canada and around the world, promoting best-practices and Indigenous decision-making in economic development.
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