Message from the President and CEO.
Our mission, to build an economy that provides for life, is vital and urgent, but it also demands deep patience. This is work that requires thoughtful cultivation, a healthy appetite for exploring the unknown, and a willingness to learn from failure. Along the way, everything we do is nourished by the deepening relationships with people and place. These are the connections that grow quietly below the surface, sustaining the important action unfolding above ground. This is a garden of ideas, people, and projects that we have tended for more than thirty years.
The importance of cultivating the roots of change in rural, remote, and Indigenous communities cannot be overstated. In each of these communities is the information, wisdom, practice, and energy needed to reinvent whole systems. As the grinding rattle of an extractive economy pulls itself apart, it is from these communities that our most practical and meaningful alternatives for a vibrant, resilient economic life will emerge.
In a blog at the end of 2025, I reflected on a hard reality — no, we have not stopped climate change, reversed biodiversity loss, or transformed the global economy. I’m revisiting this point to emphasize the importance of what we have achieved. Our part in these existential struggles is to co-create with communities the capacities, relationships, and tools they need to cultivate their own future. In 2025, consider the following examples of how we partnered with communities through our five programs:
Community Fisheries: we amplified the voices of independent fishers as they fight for policy reform that will unlock their entrepreneurial energy, allowing those with the most at stake in sustainability to lead fisheries management.
Climate Resilience: launched the Climate Resilience Network for the Central Interior of BC, which is already strengthening forest-based communities through regional analysis, planning support, and access to funding.
Food Systems: formed the North Coast Food Hub in Prince Rupert on Ts’msyen Territory, with plans for greenhouses, community markets, and education programs to grow a robust and resilient local food economy.
Indigenous Homelands: we created the Routes to Roots project to support the return to Indigenous-led trading systems and youth-driven circular economies. This project is grounded in long-standing relationships and traditional governance in communities.
Community Energy: working with 200+ rural, remote, and Indigenous households to complete home energy retrofits — including heat pumps—to reduce energy bills, greenhouse gases, and improve health for decades.
Partnering with communities also requires ongoing accountability within our own walls. In 2025, we advanced our reconciliation evaluation framework and our organizational learning agenda — the internal roots, if you will, that keep us accountable to our partners and the public.
All around us, the systems and structures that have been maintaining the status quo are weakening. The resulting transformation will be both disruptive and necessary. The roots we tended in 2025 are part of our larger investment to meet change with creativity and resilience, and to empower communities to meet the future on their own terms. After all, it may be from these very communities that the most hopeful new shoots of life will emerge.
Chuck Rumsey, President and CEO