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Ikigai: Finding Meaning in the Everyday

  In a world that often measures success through productivity, wealth, and recognition, the Japanese word ikigai offers a gentler way to think about a meaningful life. Ikigai, pronounced ee-key-guy , is commonly translated as “a reason for being” or “that which makes life worth living.” It can describe the purpose that guides someone through life, but it can also refer to something much simpler: a morning ritual, a creative hobby, caring for a loved one, tending a garden, or sharing time with friends. People often assume that purpose must be extraordinary. They believe they need to discover one perfect career, calling, or mission that will explain everything. Your reason for getting up in the morning does not have to impress anyone. It does not need to become a business, attract attention, or change the world. Meaning can be found in small actions that make life feel worthwhile. For one person, ikigai may be teaching. For another, it may be cooking for family, learning a la...
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Mental Health at the Workplace: Building a Culture Where People Truly Thrive

 The Silent Crisis No One Talks About at the Monday Meeting There's a conversation happening in break rooms, in bathroom stalls, and in the quiet of a commute home, a conversation about exhaustion that goes bone-deep, about dread that arrives with Sunday evening, about smiling through a team call while quietly falling apart. Mental health at the workplace is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, yet it remains one of the least addressed. The numbers don't lie. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy $1 trillion per year in lost productivity. Burnout was officially recognized as an occupational phenomenon by the WHO in 2019. And yet, in most organizations, the response to a struggling employee is still a polite suggestion to "take a day off”, as if a single day off could undo months of chronic stress. This blog isn't about quick fixes or motivational posters in the office kitchen. It's about understandin...
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Conservation is a human problem, and it always has been

  After decades working in the field I've come to one unavoidable conclusion: you cannot save nature without first understanding people. There is a moment every field conservationist knows. You stand at the edge of a forest patch, species checklist in hand, satellite imagery overlaid with boundary lines, and you look out at a landscape that is quietly, relentlessly changing. Not because of some distant abstraction called deforestation, but because a family is clearing half a hectare to plant maize. Because a herder's cattle are following the same corridor they have followed for generations. Because a river that once ran clean now carries the residues of a village that has no other option. In that moment, the biology is simple. The ecology is legible. But the solution? The solution lives entirely in the domain of human behaviour. I have spent my career, working to conserve key ecosystems and species in Latin America, and more recently in other areas around the world, watch...
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Purpose Was Never About Me: A conversation that changed the way I see everything.

Yesterday I sat down with someone and we started talking , the kind of talking that starts casual and ends up going somewhere you didn't expect. We were talking about purpose. And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, something quietly shifted for me. We've all asked ourselves the question at some point. What is my purpose? We frame it as a deeply personal search,   something to discover alone, like a treasure buried somewhere inside us, waiting to be uncovered. I've spent time with that question myself. Turned it over. Examined it from different angles. And for a long time, I thought the answer had to do with me. My passions. My fulfillment. My happiness. But yesterday, my friend said something that stopped me: "Purpose isn't something you find inside yourself. It's something that happens between you and other people." "We think we're doing things for ourselves. But we're always,   always,   doing them for someone else." ...
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Enviromental and Social Governance: Key for Accountability in Conservation and Development

There is a quiet paradox at the heart of today's sustainability conversation. The organizations that spend their days restoring mangroves, training indigenous land guardians, measuring biodiversity baselines, and building equitable governance structures in fragile territories, the NGOs, foundations, and civil society coalitions of the third sector, are often the least visible players in the ESG discourse. And yet they are, in practice, doing ESG work before ESG had a name. The time has come to close that gap, not merely to speak the language of ESG, but to actively reshape it from within.   A Framework Born for Finance, Borrowed by Mission ESG, Environmental, Social and Governance, emerged as a screening mechanism for investors seeking to value companies beyond traditional financial indicators. Its logic was straightforward: measuring a firm's carbon footprint, its labor practices, and the integrity of its leadership, and you have a richer picture of long-term risk and value. I...
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The People Who Shaped My Career (And the Ones Who Taught Me What Not to Do)

  People ask me sometimes,   how did you learn what you know? Where did you get your approach to work, to teams, to leadership? Honestly? Most of it didn't come from a course or a book. It came from people. Leaders who crossed my path at the right, or wrong,   moment. And I think it's worth talking about, because we don't say this enough: the leader you work for can change the entire trajectory of your career.   The One Who Told Me the Truth Early in my career, I received feedback that stung. A leader sat across from me and told me, plainly, that I wasn't paying enough attention to detail. That my work was good in the big picture, but I was missing things, small things that mattered. I remember leaving that conversation feeling deflated. Maybe even a little humiliated. I had worked hard. I thought I had done well. But here's the thing, that leader was right. And more importantly, they cared enough to say it to my face instead of working around me or simp...
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From Strategy to Execution: Why Plans Fail in NGOs (and What Actually Works)

  Every year, NGOs around the world invest enormous effort into strategic planning. Workshops are held, consultants are hired, beautifully formatted documents are produced. The vision is clear. The priorities are aligned. The board approves. And then, slowly, quietly, nothing changes. This is not a story about bad strategy. Most NGO strategies are perfectly reasonable. It is a story about the gap between deciding and doing, and why that gap swallows so many well-intentioned plans whole. The uncomfortable truth is that execution doesn't fail because people don't care. It fails because organizations lack the operating infrastructure to turn decisions into sustained action. They have strategy. They don't have rhythm.   The Five Reasons NGO Plans Fail Before we talk about what works, it is worth being honest about what consistently doesn't, and why. These failure patterns are remarkably consistent across organizations, regardless of size, geography, or cause area. ...
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