Relationships & Reciprocity Program
The Relationships and Reciprocity (RR) program carries out the NEFOC-LT vision by actionably prioritizing reciprocal relationships with land, community partners, external partners, and non-human kin. Guided by our vision and continuously evolving values and principles, in collaboration with NEFOC-LT’s Co-directors, community of organizers, and staff, the RR program is contributing to the co-creation of a community of holistic, celebratory, polyculture of Land-based Practice that reciprocally sustains each other and will continue to do so for generations. This co-creation ensures the RR program can develop, maintain, evolve, and compost the resources, structures, systems, and processes required to build and steward the reciprocal relationships required to manifest and maintain a kin-centered, BIPOC-led regional land trust. The core of the RR program considers how we can be in reciprocal relationship with the land and each other through ancestral, relational, and technical/transformational approaches. The RR program is where NEFOC begins its journey with potential partners, funders, allies, and siblings and includes:
Indigenous Reciprocity & Partnerships: We are building relational bridges between our communities with First Nations whose lands we currently occupy, partnering through reciprocity leading to stonger BIPOC land relationships and cross-cultural partnerships.
Communications: Stories are the key creating containers for historical memory, knowledge dissemination, and ancestral practice. The RR program holds and tells multi-lingual stories, communicating to our networks, partners, and resourcers about our work in the world.
Relational Bridging: We connect people with land. Through projects and events that build solidarity, transform conflict, and bring values-aligned land-based community together we are creating a critical mass of community aimed at healing relationships on land, with our ancestors both internally and externally.
Land Stewardship Planning and Biocultural Re-storyation: We are building towards developing advocacy for and partnership on the development of equitable land stewardship planning, grounded in Traditional Ecological Knowledge, that incorporates instead of excludes human and non-human relationships, centered on the restoration of ecosystems and re-storyation of cross-cultural land-based relationships.