intercultural relations
intercultural relations
context
Indigenous people are 4% of the global population, yet they protect 80% of the planet’s biodiversity. Their understanding of how to live in harmony with nature was disregarded for hundreds of years, but the world is realizing the imminent need of incorporating it into our contemporary lifestyles.
There is a powerful opportunity at the intersection of ancestral knowledge and modern technology. When brought together responsibly, they can generate scalable, culturally rooted solutions for a more sustainable future.
However, not all initiatives have succeeded. While some partnerships with Indigenous and rural communities have created meaningful, long-term impact, many others have caused harm. These failures are often the result of extractive models, limited intercultural understanding, and solutions imposed from the outside rather than co-created with communities.
the C+E Methodology
A mindset-rewiring and intuition-sensitizing approach designed to support entrepreneurs and cross-culture pollinators towards crafting their visions ethically and successfully while healing intercultural relations.
I set out to design a methodology that acts as a guide to co-create sustainable business models in collaboration with rural and indigenous communities. It is a set frameworks and tools that allows entrepreneurs and innovators to understand the particularities of each community and develop a projects that take them into account.
This methodology has its roots in Design Thinking. However, instead of considering the “end user” as the only client, it puts the local community’s satisfaction at the center, because without understanding their needs, wants, desires and ways, projects that interfere with them are bound to be neo-colonial and receive resistance instead of collaboration.
Applying the methodology encourages including all stakeholders as active co-creators of the project or product at hand, ensuring collaborative relationships and mutually beneficial results.
goals
To build bridges between urban creators and ancestral wisdom keepers through fruitful, profitable and reciprocal collaborations.
To activate local economies in indigenous and rural communities, enabling their permanence as stewards of their land + culture and avoiding neo-colonization.
To leverage the collaboration between groups with different skillsets and a common interest to build earth-loving futures.
To repair the wounds left by colonization in ways that prevent us from repeating the same patterns in modern expressions.