Rock Creek Institute
Initiatives
While we are at the early stages of developing our full business plan, we have begun the process of ground-truthing and calibrating the WIA Process, which distills insights from a broad array of, successful and unsuccessful, collaborations over decades. To identify prospective problem domains to focus on, we map the interests and insights of our partners to global research on problem domains impacting wellbeing for all.
We draw on the “Five Turn Arounds” outlined in Earth for All, the “Ten Actions” delineated in the Future We Choose, and the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, among other work, to help identify patterns around intersections, conflicts, tradeoffs, reinforcing relationships, and root drivers.
In making our final choices, we integrate this information with an assessment of the overall problem significance, the extent to which the problem represents low hanging fruit, the extent to which an effective response is likely to leverage subsequent responses, the ratio of expected impact to the availability of required resources, and the extent to which the problem effects local and regional wellbeing. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we attempt to consider the extent to which successful innovations and their effective diffusion are likely to advance humanity’s quest to become Wise Ancestors.
We are currently incubating communities of passion, purpose and practice to delve into the following problem domains and create Opportunity Statements to address them:
Play for All.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: While play—including sports, music, art, serious games, and adventure in nature—has been identified as a powerful tool for individuals and groups to learn, disconnect from the demands of everyday life, check their biases, spark creative solutions, and dream big, its use in supporting innovative problem-solving and personal growth has been sporadic and distributed inequitably.
Goals: Identify, rapidly prototype, and evaluate, initiatives for taking advantage of play as a lever for advancing wellbeing in ignored and/or underserved communities. Create entities to implement and scale the most compelling innovations.
Health Equity and Healing Trauma.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: Dr. Kinari Webb has had an outsized impact in addressing the tragic relationship between lack of access to health care and lack of agency, destruction of nature, and reduction in wellbeing. In a corollary, intersecting tragedy, the World Health Organization, estimates that 70% of the world’s population has been exposed to a traumatic event and nearly 4% of the world’s population has had a post-traumatic stress disorder at some point in their life. Health inequity and trauma, in its many forms, inhibit the emergence of humanity’s better angels and hamstring efforts to advance wellbeing for all.
Goals: Refine, scale, and equitably distribute—starting with communities most at risk and most in need—effective evidence-based solutions that employ medical care, self-awareness, self-care, and group support to heal mind, body, and spirit. Where gaps are identified, create new innovations.
Fire Safe and Resilient Design.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: A 2022 report by First Street estimates that 49.4 M properties in the United States face minor level of fire risk (with a cumulative burn probability below 1%); 20.2M properties face moderate risk (6% maximum cumulative burn probability); 6.0M face major risk (14% maximum burn probability); 2.7M face severe risk (26% maximum cumulative burn probability); and 1.5M properties face extreme risk (with cumulative burn probabilities of 26% and up). These impacts are expected to grow over the next thirty years due to climate change. Land use policy and building practices can drastically reduce the impacts of fire risk.
Goals: To advance affordable, fire-safe, regenerative construction practices that are fit for site, drastically reduce energy and water demand, and positively impact human and natural systems.
Reinventing Journalism.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: As Robert Rosenthal reports in “Reinventing Journalism,” the profit-driven model for funding investigative journalism and the attacks on journalists and journalistic freedom not only put investigative journalism at risk—they
compromise the very foundations of democracy and the primary instrument for maintaining an informed citizenry.
Goals: Advance promising new models for funding investigative journalism, create new strategies for expanding its ambit and accessibility, and build additional safeguards so that it can become a more effective and sustainable agent for informing the public, exposing falsehoods and manipulation, and supporting public participation and engagement.
Water Wellness.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: While the nurturing and healing properties of water have been celebrated for millennia, the World Wildlife Fund reports that 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to fresh water, 2.7 billion experience water scarcity for at least one month/year, 2.4 billion are faced with inadequate sanitation, and more than half of the world’s wetlands have disappeared.
Goals: Make clean water and sanitation accessible and affordable for everyone while increasing the availability of fresh water for nature, recreation, and healing through innovations that honor the miracle of water, reduce demand for wasteful and frivolous usage, enhance conservation, and support radically more efficient use and reuse.
In addition to the previously identified problem domains, several other promising initiative areas are under consideration, including:
1. Mayacamas Sanctuary—to safeguard the critical fire and biodiversity corridors, restore the forest and habitat adjacent to the original Mayacamas Ranch, and serve as a physical, living-learning laboratory for Fire Safe and Resilient Design, Water Wellness, Backyard Victory Gardens, and the challenges other Communities of Passion, Purpose, and Practice.
2. Quality Carbon Offsets—to respond to the need for verifiable carbon offsets that incentivize regenerative farming practices and directly support smallholder farmers.
3. Conscious Transition and Green Burial—Each year, roughly 62 million people die globally and this number is estimated to increase substantially due to both aging populations and historic population growth. Addressing the psychosocial and environmental impacts of these deaths represents an enormous untapped opportunity to advance wellbeing for all.
Backyard Victory Gardens.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: According to a recent report on household food security, early 45 million people in the US are food insecure and even more have limited access to fresh, healthy, sustainably grown food. In 1944, nearly 2/3 of American households grew victory gardens, which produced 40% of the nation’s produce. Victory gardens helped build a mindset of abundance and local self-reliance, despite the ravages of WW II.
Goals: Identify and incubate high-leverage, accessible, and scalable solutions for realizing the potential of victory gardens to eliminate food deserts, fix carbon, regenerate soil, support local self-reliance and biodiversity, build healthy communities, and increase the availability of fresh, tasty food.
Everyone at the Table.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: Provisional Problem Appraisal: Historically, marginalized peoples and communities are most impacted by environmental problems and wellbeing challenges. As documented in the Green2.0 2023 NGO & Foundation Transparency Report Card, there is also a corresponding, systemic lack of diversity in the NGO and Foundation world. These representation challenges persist in the innovation, social impact investing, and decision-making arenas too.
Goals: Build the RCI Communities of Passion, Purpose, and Practice; governance structure and board community; and staff so that diverse voices are represented and reflected in all decision-making processes. Build additional support for marginalized peoples in our arena by creating a mentoring initiative for those early in their career, a residency program for those in mid-career, and a retreat program for other organizations.
Reimagining Heartwood Mtn Sanctuary.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: For over forty years, in various guises, the remote Heartwood Mountain Sanctuary, at the center of the Emerald Triangle in Humboldt County, California, has served as a remarkable experiment in holistic healing, permaculture, right livelihood, and service as “love in action”. The property is currently for sale and the local economy, which was dependent on Cannabis farming, is in shambles.
Goals: Create a financially stable, robust governance model for Heartwood as a thriving living, learning wellbeing laboratory and retreat center for the community and beyond. Demonstrate through this model how nurturing connection to self, each other, our ancestors, and wild nature can support innovation in service of people and the planet and generate exponential impact.