Dalai Lama Fellows
Emi Koch
Leadership Vision
The world needs leadership grounded in kindness, authenticity, and respect now more than ever before. Leadership that cultivates space for motivation and inspiration towards goals that center care and upon abundance for all: humans and non-human living entities.
Project Description
The Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines Curriculum facilitates dedicated spaces for young learners from small-scale fishing communities to critically reflect and practice reciprocal relationships with their local aquatic environments and villages and generate data about their social-ecological systems for greater representation in academia, policy, and strategic resource management plans. This entails students understanding their local context in political, social, ecological, and food systems frameworks and fostering caring relations among humans and non-humans. Rural educators use the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations' Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security & Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines) as a framework to guide students through themes like biodiversity, gender equity, and decent work as reflected in their built and natural systems. The SSF Guidelines is the first international instrument to protect SSF stakeholders’ rights, focusing on root causes and realizing systems-level changes in policy. Emi's compassion-in-action project seeks to enable learners to gain and contribute to a kaleidoscopic awareness of their fishery in the context of ecological precarity while monitoring the local implementation of the SSF Guidelines.