Living Islands
Living Islands is an educational nonprofit organization serving the community of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. We are dedicated to helping island residents sustainably modernize while preserving their cultural heritage and natural environment. Living Islands is helping to foster sustainable, modern communities in the Pacific Islands while preserving and celebrating the vibrant culture of the region and providing opportunities for global interaction, education, and connection.
Through collaborative partnerships, environmental education and professional sustainability practices, we strive to bridge the gap between traditional communities and their modern counterparts. To do this, we will create a model that identifies the needs of the developing Marshall Islands communities in the core areas of:
Energy Supply: We will work with the local community to discover which renewable energy sources are possible in the environment and how those sources can be applied. Members of the local community can then be taught how to build and maintain effective renewable energy systems.
Education: We will establish local centers of knowledge that will give direct access to a wealth of valuable and applicable information. These centers will feature both online and offline sources to significantly widen educational opportunities and bring about learning on a much broader scale.Through partnerships with renowned educational institutions in the United States, Living Islands plans to establish an exchange of both culture and educational experience.
Ethnic Preservation: We will preserve, support, and celebrate regional ethnic and cultural heritage by not only respecting it but making it a primary component of all Living Islands projects. Working with the community, we will do our part to record, protect and share its local customs and traditional way of life.
Environmental Protection: We will serve as conscientious stewards of the fragile ecosystem by planning and executing all projects jointly with the islanders.All Living Islands initiatives are designed to minimize or eliminate any potential environmental footprint.
We will execute our various projects with local labor and training, ensuring that we leave behind the knowledge, skills and qualifications that will empower islanders for years to come. With the proper tools, the local population will be able to replicate any project, build new infrastructure, and train future generations without relying on continued external assistance.
Our efforts in the Marshall Islands are designed to serve as a blueprint for future projects of this type in other regions of the world. Because of this, we will collect all knowledge and experience gained from local projects, through electronic documentation, video blogs, journals, and legal documents. We will distribute this information as a template that can be easily accessed online absolutely free of charge. By doing this, we hope to assist populations in other geographical regions that are faced with similar difficulties or needs. We invite communities throughout the world to benefit from and expand on the collective knowledge that we have gained.