Step into my shoes for a moment: You are the president of the Island Institute and have accepted an invitation to attend a discussion on Lake Como in Bellagio, Italy with 20 corporate and nonprofit leaders from around the world. Over the course of a week, you are to work as part of this new team to develop a way to speed up the sharing of solutions that can create a more resilient planet in the face of devastating global change.
Perhaps you are thinking:
How incredibly exciting! Why the Island Institute? Are Maine’s issues globally relevant? I will never live this down at home if it is not practically useful! Will I meet George Clooney?!
Disheveled from 12 hours of travel, you change into a pressed dress shirt and brush your teeth in an airport bathroom. You emerge in Milan and for the first time in your life, a chauffer is waiting with a sign that has your name on it.
You and three others pile into the back of a small Mercedes van. The others work at Oxfam and Mercy Corps and move easily between French and English. You soak in the development patois, but since you studied Spanish and Chinese you are only catching fragments. A mall bombing”¦ friends injured”¦ Kenyan troops are over the border”¦ the refugee situation”¦ media black out”¦ friends under arrest in the Arctic.
A charming fellow sitting next to you turns and apologizes for not introducing himself sooner.
“Hello, I’m from Mercy Corps, just flew in from Somalia, haven’t slept in a while.” The folks in the back seat introduce themselves and explain their work creating women’s collectives to enable community banking in Africa.
“I’m with the Island Institute in Maine,” I say. “We work to sustain Maine’s island and remote coastal communities.”
As you weave your way into the Italian Alps, a polite yet quizzical look crosses the faces of people you will spend 14-hour work days with over the next week.
“Please, tell us more.”
I had been thinking about this moment for a while and for important reasons. The world is changing fast, and very real pain and suffering surround us. Climate change, drilling in the Arctic, poverty, lack of clean water, inequality; these are systemic issues that plague humanity.
So then, how does the Island Institute’s work stack up? Where is the urgency? Is there value in our work to those who spend their days staffing refugee camps or working for women’s reproductive rights? Does it matter?
The answers are critical.
Donna Damon of Chebeague Island, vice chairwoman of the Island Institute board, puts it this way: any time you lose a community, whether it is an island or on the mainland, the whole world has lost something of tremendous value.
The Institute’s board chairman Joe Higdon of Tenants Harbor was the first resident of Tennessee to join the Peace Corps. He believed early in life that he would make the world a better place, but with time he resolved to do the best he can in his backyard. Thinking globally, acting locally.
I couldn’t agree more, and would add that there is an urgency to understand and share how island and remote coastal communities survive and thrive. Here along Maine’s coast we are forced to live within our environmental limits and our lives are enriched and made possible because we must rely on each other, even when we disagree.
Living within environmental limits and relying on each other: island and coastal survival skills for the planet. They apply here and ought to apply everywhere. Everyone in Bellagio immediately understood, believed this to be true, and felt the same urgency I do. As a result, the Island Institute became a charter member of the “Resilience Initiative.”
Over the coming year we will extend the resilience initiative to island and remote coastal communities along the East Coast of the U.S. by organizing a retreat for leaders who would like to share solutions that make their communities more economically resilient.
Rob Snyder is president of the Island Institute. Rob thanks Ectotrust for inviting him to join the Resilience Initiative and the Rockefeller Foundations for making the Resilience Initiative possible.