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
Click on the project name to learn more.
Champions of Change Leadership School
Champions of Change Nation Re-Building Program:
This program provides aspiring Indigenous leaders with the opportunity to learn from award-winning businesses leaders and green tech innovators from across Canada and around the world. The course exposes the next generation of leaders to the world of opportunities that exist and gives them the confidence and tools to lead Nations back to self-sustaining, thriving and enterprising economies. This is not just economic development; it is Nation Re-Building, bringing together traditional values with modern technologies and innovations for a new way forward. It is currently being offered to Canadian Indigenous community members.
Integrity Systems
We support Indigenous communities to re-build resilient infrastructure systems that can support healthy and thriving people as well as opportunities for developing green local economies. We are researching and incubating natural solutions in food, energy, water and housing that foster well-being and work with our life systems. These Integrity Systems approach development from a relationship-based understanding of the interconnectedness of life systems, together with modern technology, seeking to harness efficiencies by working in partnership with our natural world.
Land-Based Learning & Healing Spaces
We are supporting the reclamation of indigenous land stewardship initiatives, and the learning from best practices globally to support innovation and best practice locally.
Mno Aki Land Trust
We are supporting the establishment of the Mno Aki Land Trust, where Indigenous Grandmothers from across Canada have come together in leadership and governance, representing different First Nations groups, to create a platform for change. Mno Aki is a federally incorporated land trust and registered charity that is able to receive donations of land to be stewarded for indigenous entrepreneurship and innovation, leadership and governance, market-relevant training, access to land, the tools, resources and knowledge to steward lands and protect and strengthen traditional knowledge, innovating sustainable infrastructure for community wellbeing and prosperity, harnessing the latest in green technology combined with traditional knowledge, and creating linkages between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and knowledge systems to begin the process of learning from one another as the best way to eliminate systemic racism. Through the models that are being created, we will share nationally and globally to affect policy change.
Find out more and how you can get involved: www.mnoaki.org
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.
Creating Life Economies & Nation Re-Building
Our Life Economy Project is building a model in both Canada and Ecuador’s Amazon to demonstrate different aspects of a full valuation of real wealth of human and natural capital for a vibrant local economic movement of goods and services, using ecosystem mapping technology, IoT, blockchain and modern “green” accounting principles. This will support the preservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and the enhancement of local ecosystems within the Tahltan and Sápara territory, and it will create a fund for the implementation of local economic development initiatives. In this way, it is hoped that communities will be able to reclaim sovereignty over their true wealth, resources and their future. This project will work as a model to be implemented across Canada, with an initial focus on BC and Ontario.
Community of Wise Practice
We have established a community hub of wise practice connecting leaders, communities and change agents that facilitates learning and cross-pollination to empower enhanced innovation and change to be possible. The Hub’s Resource Library is an interactive space of sharing and exchanging experiences, frameworks for development, application of latest technology and wise practice, to empower communities and leaders with the resources they need to create transformational change locally.
Our Advocacy & Policy Work
We advocate for, educate and bring awareness to better ways of working together and bridging the Indigenous and secular ways of knowing. We are 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. We support Indigenous leaders drive policy change and advancement in human rights globally. We are a bridge to a better world, together.
Get InvolvedOur Past Projects
