In Colombia, Tradewinds joined the Ijolli Project to expand the Janindu Natural Reserve. Here, we are focused on preservation of the headwaters and tributaries, flora, fauna, sacred sites, ancestral traditions and local communities through activities that are culturally pertinent, environmentally sustainable and economically viable.
Mission
Our mission is to create an infrastructure to develop educational, cultural, regenerative agroforestry and ecosystem conservation programs in collaboration with local farmers, city dwellers and indigenous communities.
Vision
We envision a healthy and balanced Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta ecological region organized as a harmonious dynamic system which includes protecting its diverse ecosystems and their inhabitants and establishing an interconnected trade between peoples and bioregions.
Action
Ijolli seeks to reveal the essential unity of the web of life and heal all relations. The spaces in the mountain that were formerly used in an unconscious manner, due to the sociopolitical and economic antecedents that marked Colombia's history, are revitalized, rehabilitated and transmuted through the holistic arts. In these spaces, the first replicable model of regenerative and educational tourism in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta was created.
Environmentally, the Ijolli Project seeks to establish an ecological corridor named Cordón del Corazón (Cord of the Heart) by 2025 that will connect the marine and coastal Tairona National park with the terrestrial Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta national park, from the mountain peaks to the coast. The ecological corridor Cordón del Corazón acts as a protective axis between unsustainable development and the indigenous ancestral territory through environmentally regenerative, economically viable and culturally pertinent agroforestry cooperatives.
Ijolli proposes to create an ecological corridor, maintaining the optimal conditions for the survival of keystone species such as the jaguar (Panthera onca); and to conserve and restore the existing ecosystems and watersheds within the Reserve.
Through cultural Identity, Ijolli aspires to create a direct and harmonious exchange with the natural resources and inhabitants of the region; an infrastructure for the people to recognize their essence, tradition and legacy.
Ijolli maintains that everything which is produced in the reserve speaks about the identity of a village and the folklore and process of a country that has deeply struggled to be where it is today.
Ijolli aims to create the school of Ancestral Knowledge of the Earth (SNAKE) that has the adequate infrastructure for the indigenous people to teach their practices and traditional ecological knowledge