Kwaxala

Organizational Innovator | 2023-2024 | view all creations

Founding team member supporting the organizational, governance, and strategic design of a regenerative forest investment network & its ecological accounting system.

Kwaxala is an Indigenous-led regenerative forest network redefining forest stewardship by transforming extractive licenses into ecosystem regeneration rights. In 2023, I joined the founding team, contributing to the organizational design, governance architecture, and culture development of this visionary initiative—designed to center Indigenous sovereignty and ecological restoration while mobilizing investment into living natural systems.

As part of this work, I also contributed to the early development of Centree, Kwaxala’s ecological indexing and regenerative finance protocol. Centree introduces a novel measurement unit (the Centree) and a token-backed system to quantify, protect, and value ecosystems based on their regenerative capacity—not just carbon alone. My focus included early-stage messaging strategy, ecosystem framing, and alignment of Centree’s conceptual model with Kwaxala’s broader mission.

I transitioned out of the project in 2024 as the M̓ac̓inuxʷ Special Forest Management Area—a groundbreaking 140,000-acre coastal rainforest project — was secured for experimentation as a pilot area.

    • Founding Team (2023)

    • Organizational and systems architecture for Kwaxala

    • Governance design aligned with Indigenous equity and control

    • Strategic messaging and narrative framing for both Kwaxala and Centree

    • Cultural design to support network collaboration

    • Organizational Design: Helped develop systemic scaffolding for a multi-partner, equity-distributed network

    • Governance Strategy: Advised on mechanisms that ensure Indigenous-led control and community reinvestment

    • Organizational Culture: Supported values-aligned practices for collaboration across partners and disciplines

    • Messaging: Supported strategic communications and narrative development to explain complex regenerative finance concepts

    • Systems Insight: Helped map interrelations between ecological, financial, legal, and cultural layers of the project

    • Designing systemic alternatives to extractive forestry

    • Witnessing the launch of the M̓ac̓inuxʷ Special Forest Management Area

    • Supporting a globally scalable model that foregrounds ecological and cultural regeneration

    • Groundwork for the M̓ac̓inuxʷ Special Forest Management Area – 140,000 acres returned to Indigenous stewardship

    • Foundations for the Centree Token – a regenerative currency backed by protected nature

    • Scalable system for forest protection and revenue generation through ecosystem services

    • Contributed to strategic positioning, partner engagement, and pilot launch design

    • Kwiakah First Nation – Founding Forest Partner

    • Kwaxala Core Team – Interdisciplinary collaborators in stewardship, strategy, and finance

    • The forests and ecosystems of British Columbia – source of life and inspiration