Collaboration & Bridge Building
Community Partners Make it Possible
We honor and acknowledge that what is currently called Boulder County sits on the unceded, traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Hinóno’éi (Arapaho), Cheyenne, Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux), and Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute) Nations.
What is AFC+A & What Do We Do?
A Latina-led and founded 501 (c)(3)environmental nonprofit, AFC+A is Colorado and Puerto Rico based with an international reach. We house initiatives that advance community resilience, a citizenry of environmental stewards, leveraging arts and culture for conservation gains. Our programs promote a diverse and non-segregated conservation movement through culturally relevant education that addresses the needs of previously underserved and underrepresented communities in the green movement. ¿Qué es AFC+A & Qué Hacemos? Fundada por una Puertorriqueña y liderada por Latino Americanos esta organización ambiental sin fines de lucro cuenta con oficinas en Colorado y Puerto Rico, con alcance internacional. AFC+A maneja más de diez programas que avanzan resiliencia ciudadana, a través de la educación, la cultura y la promotoria verde.
South Indian Mountain
Serving Veterans and community through Native American ceremonies and projects.
Spiritual Advisory Board
Andrea Yoloteotl Chalchihuitl Nawage
Andrea Yoloteotl Chalchihuitl Nawage has the honor of carrying fire from her Aztec Culture. She has been an Aztec Dancer for over two decades, conducts and guides circles and ceremonies, and participated in the Moon Dance ceremony for seven years. She is currently collaborating with several environmental and social justice initiatives and organizations in Boulder County that are focused on claiming rights of nature, indigenous knowledge, and ecofeminist principles.
She is in the process of starting a non-profit, Harvest of All First Nations, that will focus on food justice, land reclamation, preservation of medicinal plants, and ecofeminist practices. Currently, she is a student at Naropa University pursuing a B.A. in Environmental Studies. She firmly believes that by healing feminine connection and reconnecting people back to the Earth, we can heal Mother Earth to make a better place for all living beings of future generations.
Doug Red Hail Pineda
Doug Red Hail Pineda is an award-winning author, entrepreneur, and spiritual advisor to front-line social justice and land defense movements rooted in sovereignty, equality and liberation for the next seven generations. Rolling Stone Magazine calls Doug Red Hail a ‘purveyor of spiritual wisdom’. Doug is known for his ideas of bringing conscious living, mindful consumption and collective impact to the forefront of human consciousness.
Doug is a renowned frontline activist and freedom fighter with experience on countless humanitarian and environmental direct actions. He is the award-winning co-creator of Think Indigenous ~ Native American Spirituality for a Modern World by Hay House Publishing.
Origins of emptiness
“I believe a huge part of our collective feeling of emptiness comes from living in a self-centered phase of our evolution as a species, where everything begins with I. I want this object, I want to succeed. I want to improve myself. Even: I want to belong.
But true happiness depends upon our reciprocity with the environment in which we are embedded, and unto which we are indebted.
In the same way that mitochondria work to break down nutrients and turn it into energy for our bodies, we too are but a single component of a greater biosphere that sees no hierarchy between ferns and redwoods, worms and eagles.
If we imagine an invisible mycelial network under the visible surface of things, of which we are but fruiting bodies, then we see how our lives should be in service to feeding the whole forest together. Our negligence of that reciprocity is, more than any other factor, what fosters unbelonging.”
— Excerpt from Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner (belongingbook.com)