In January 2024, while working in Peru, we began building the idea of Tima - Ethical Connectors with a vision for facilitating transformational work to help disparate but aligned peoples and efforts connect and collaborate. A key element in our work, as you will see below, is a focus on enabling Indigenous-led processes that facilitate bottom-up fundraising and project management. Our mission is to develop new paradigms for mutually responsible collaboration and reciprocity - not only between cultures, sectors, and disciplines, but also between humans and non-humans.
After seven months of development, we are truly excited to announce Tima, together with some of the projects we have been working on. We believe in everyone’s right to pursue their passions. These projects are all aspects of what feeds our souls, whilst doing our part to make this world a healthier and more just place for all. If any of these projects resonate with you and your passions, and if you are an interested funder, investor, or partner, please reach out! (For more about us read further below.)
<<If you are interested in learning more about us and our projects - please join us for a global online Q&A on Tuesday 8 October 2024 @ 5pm GMT (9am Los Angeles, 7pm Helsinki). Register here.>>
Tima’s Current Projects
Mayantuyacu - Traditional Medicinal Plants Knowledge Preservation and Transmission
Summary: Tima has partnered with the Center for Medicinal Plant Studies of Mayantuyacu in Peru to help them set up a long-term project for preserving and transmitting traditional knowledge of plant medicines and traditional Amazonian healing. The planned project has two components: 1. education - which involves i) transmission of traditional knowledge to youth, and; ii) scholarships for Indigenous youth in Peruvian Amazonia interested in becoming apprentices, and; 2. land preservation and conservation, helping the center conserve and manage native Amazonian species for the long-term sustainability of the education project, including sustainable planting and harvesting of Ayahuasca and other master plants.
Status: Working to help Mayantuyacu fundraise to acquire the resources they need.
Building and Launching AjanUni, a New Cross-cultural Association
Summary: AjanUni, which literally translates to “The Dream of Time” (but also associates to Indigenous meanings of the plant medicines ‘Aya’ / ‘Uni’), is a recently established nonprofit association in Finland. AjanUni’s mission is to help humanity remember its place in the greater ecology of life and to secure the continuity of valuable traditions, knowledge, and skills so that all sentient beings can live well. AjanUni strives to build and strengthen community, arts, nature connection, interspecies communication, and an unbiased and open dialogue of cosmologies and epistemologies, together with a review and evaluation of their impact on Earth (ecologically/socio-culturally). Through multicultural exchange, Tima is working with AjanUni to help bridge and accompany transitory processes between traditional wisdom and modern societies and technologies.
Status: Tima recently completed several intensive months of formally establishing AjanUni administratively, operationally and legally, culminating in a public launch on September 10th, 2024. For more, see ajanuni.org
Yakumama - Cultural Center and Café
Summary: Yakumama is a globally-inspired vision of a multipurpose, employee-owned cultural center and café, art gallery, artisanal and Indigenous crafts store, and public event space featuring global speakers and artists, visioned to be located in Southern Finland. Yakumama will cater to local and global audiences, also through online presence/streaming. Yakumama’s purpose is to facilitate multicultural connection in an increasingly disconnected world. The cuisine will comprise largely bioregional and seasonally changing, fresh, ecological, healthy, artisanal food and drinks.
Status: Developing the business plan for this project, while looking for an ideal venue and location to bring this project to life.
Decolonizing Philanthropy through Enabling Indigenous-Led Bottom-Up Fundraising and Projects
Summary: In our meetings with both philanthropists and Indigenous peoples/communities over the years, we have identified a glaring gap: increasingly, philanthropists and their organizations are calling for Indigenous-led projects; meanwhile, the large majority of Indigenous peoples globally do not have the language, capacity, or access to engage directly with philanthropists. One of Tima’s main efforts is to help bridge this gap, and several of our projects (also listed here) attempt to pilot new ways of decolonizing philanthropy and enabling Indigenous-led projects, from the get-go.
Status: In active dialogue with both philanthropic and Indigenous organizations that are interested in partnering with us on this effort.
Huni Kuin Capacity Building in Brazilian Amazonia
Summary: The Huni Kuin Indigenous villages along the River Jordão in Acre, Brazil have approached us about helping them develop the capacities they need to fundraise for themselves. This project works to bridge this skills gap by developing training programmes to help our Huni Kuin partners in the following areas, as prioritized by them: building and strengthening participatory and equitable governance and grassroots engagement; strengthening grassroots policies and dialogical processes; inclusion and empowerment of women and youth in the processes of training, mobilization, and engagement; fundraising and skills development; project and financial management; higher education access and applications; filmmaking and production, and; marketing.
Status: Currently working on funding proposals for this project while meeting with potential partners.
Permaculture and Climate Resilience in River Jordão
Summary: Indigenous people of the River Jordão (like many worldwide) are living in increasing victimhood of climate catastrophe and scarcity of traditional subsistence resources. The Huni Kuin were recently devastated by floods that destroyed the bulk of their crops, and are now seeking long-term solutions for food security and climate resilience. The communities are suffering from malnutrition and struggling to meet even their most basic livelihood needs (food, water, energy, shelter, etc). This project involves participatory permaculture design and training specifically for: sustainable food production; sustainable energy and water harvesting; climate-resilient housing; waste management, and; native forest and wild game species restoration and regeneration.
Status: Finalizing the project design together with our Huni Kuin partners, whilst identifying priority tiers of development that can be implemented individually.
Reclaiming and regenerating Kogui ancestral land and traditional knowledge
Summary: This project is a follow-up on a research project that one of Tima’s founders undertook with the Kogui, an Indigenous peoples living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. Despite centuries of attempted colonization and assimilation, the Kogui have largely maintained their autonomy and biocultural harmony through continued voluntary isolation, their overarching nature-based cosmovision, strong cultural identity, and intricately intertwined spiritual-political governance model over social, economic and natural systems. The Kogui are now trying to reclaim, regenerate and conserve their ancestral territory, with full access to all sacred sites therein, and simultaneously revitalize their traditional knowledge system, supporting the existing knowledge holders, both men and women, recuperate their rightful spaces and institutions. Tima is looking to help channel funds and resources to support the Kogui in reclaiming both ancestral land and knowledge.
Status: Several of Tima’s new popular and scholarly articles summarizing this project have recently been published. We are looking to engage with the Kogui about how to best execute on their vision.
The role of traditional song and storytelling in knowledge transmission and nature connection
Summary: This is a cross-cultural collaborative research-art project in the making, that sets out to examine the role of traditional songs, prayers and storytelling in transmitting ecological knowledge and in constructing and maintaining human-nature relations. Based on theories in ethnoecology, environmental anthropology, ecomusicology, and acoustemology, we study the traditional songs, prayers and stories of several Amazonian Indigenous peoples, analyzing roles and meanings. The project facilitates intercultural exchange and gives voice to artists and knowledge holders in Amazonia, strengthening their guardianship of their biocultural heritage. Status: Identified and secured key collaborators and have begun collecting first-hand data for the project.
The Ethics around Traditional Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence
Summary: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on the rise, and our founders are involved with organizations working globally to preserve human-to-human and human-with-nature (as opposed to human-to-computer) interactions. The excitement about AI has catalyzed serious questions about the ethics of using AI. Tima is supporting the work of the Earth Codes Observatory and its Indigenous Data Warriors project, among others, in exploring how to ethically, transparently, and inclusively work with AI, whilst protecting the intellectual property rights of Indigenous peoples, artists and others. The project looks into the ethics around AI using Indigenous and Traditional knowledge (largely without consent), and what implications this might have, globally.
Status: Tima has opened initial conversations with Indigenous peoples about their interests in protecting their traditional knowledge from nonconsensual use by AI.
Decolonizing Happiness
Summary: This project explores local perceptions around the meaning of happiness from a decolonial, transdisciplinary, and cross-cultural lens. It pays particular attention to elements hypothesized as determinants of well-being, namely peace and nature connectedness. One element of this science-meets-art project is a collaboration with renown photographer Antonio Briceño, and is intended to be of cultural and political relevance for laypeople, artists, scholars, and decision-makers, with the aim of not only challenging global definitions and measures of happiness, but also inspiring and informing anyone interested in happiness, well-being, and alternative sustainable development measures across the globe.
Status: Finalized project proposal in partnership with Antonio Briceño for a pilot project in Bhutan.
If any of these projects resonate with you and your passions, and if you are an interested funder, investor, or partner, please reach out!
About Tima - Ethical Connectors
Tima is the co-creation of Aili Pyhälä and Joshua Fouts who joined forces to address a need and a call to action to help communities and people realize their visions. “Tima,” in Hatxa Kuin (the language of the Huni Kuin peoples of Amazonia), means “to weave.” Connecting the right projects to people who are looking to access them is what we do, by weaving partnerships, helping to identify nodes of ideal matches, and formulating these into new, innovative, mutually responsible forms of collaboration.
Aili Pyhälä, PhD joins Tima after spending 25 years as an activist and scholar championing the rights of people and planet, focusing primarily on biodiversity conservation, traditional knowledge, and biocultural rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities. She has worked as a consultant in the above-mentioned domains for more than 20 years, and has sat on the Council of the ICCA Consortium. Passionate about holistic health, her personal journey includes a deep commitment to Amazonian plant medicines and medicine music.
Joshua Fouts joins Tima after a professional journey that includes 30 years of service and intercultural advocacy, which started as a career in foreign policy and academia, leading to launching NGOs, philanthropic foundations, and social impact companies worldwide in support of nonhuman animal rights, interspecies communication, ethical technology, Indigenous rights, global education, and environmental justice. Josh is trained as an anthropologist, depth psychology therapist, and archetypal astrologer. He has had a lifelong relationship with Brazil.
How to engage with us
We invite you to join us as a client, collaborator, funder, investor or partner in one or more of our projects.
For more information about our services, click here
If you are interested in scheduling a meeting or a consultation, please contact us at: info@timaweb.world
<<If you are interested in learning more about us and our projects - please join us for a global online Q&A on Tuesday 8 October 2024 @ 5pm GMT (9am Los Angeles, 7pm Helsinki). Register here.>>
Comments