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:

  • Development: The R&R Program is central to the cultivation of enduring resources with private donors, foundations, and other resourcers that nourish the work of the land trust and the communities and lands we serve. 

  • 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: 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 advocy 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.