Karina Chamorro (ELP 2024) | Associate Program Officer, Global Climate Initiative, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, USA

Roots – it’s what grounds many living things to the environment. For humans, roots anchor our present to our past. Our metaphorical roots shape our values, vision, and interactions as we grow and thrive. My roots stem from being born in Lima, Peru to a family that valued education and service to the community – amid a national context of deep social and economic inequality and violent upheaval. This shaped my early understanding of human dignity, justice, and the pursuit of peace and security.

We later immigrated to the United States and set new roots in California’s Central Valley, an agricultural hub. As a shy, immigrant kid, I tended to listen more than I spoke. I observed things like the demographic differences between those who owned agricultural land and those who worked the land. Or the differences of how my community respected immigrants who arrived a century ago versus those who arrived a year ago. I saw how the family farms from my childhood slowly faded as I entered adulthood, and how ‘development’ benefitted some and sidelined others. I felt how government actions funded by a few could exacerbate generational inequality for the many, such as the impact of Propositions 209 and 227 in California. I learned how power and opportunity could be shared or restricted, biased or inclusive, based on our community leaders.

After finishing high school, I hopped across the country to attend university in Boston, Massachusetts at the launch of the millennium. Upon graduating from college during a recession, I found that jobs in international development were scarce, underpaid, and often both. The silver lining was that I was in Boston! A place where academic institutions are tucked into nearly every block. I forged my first years of career experience in university administration, ensconced in lively college campuses dotted with tech entrepreneurs, nuclear physicists, legal scholars, activists, world-class musicians – and that was just the sweatshirt-clad students.

After nearly a decade in university administration, I was on a comfortable career path but was not comfortably confident about that career path. I wondered how to find greater meaning in my work. I longed to combine my values, aspirations, lived experience, and work experience into something to motivate me for future decades. I scanned job boards and serendipitously found an organization working on international rural development through agriculture – headquartered a just a few blocks from where I lived in Massachusetts, but with a focus and regional office in my hometown of Lima, Peru. It was a social enterprise, bridging the space between mission- driven nonprofit organizations and economically oriented private enterprises – and it was the turning point where I started a new career in sustainable development.

For three years, I worked in Boston but with international colleagues in sustainable agricultural development. I learned substantive knowledge on agriculture, rural entrepreneurship, and financial credit systems at this nonprofit social enterprise. I benefited from mentors and colleagues who modeled collaborative leadership while growing an international organization, and who balanced the seriousness of the challenges in rural development with the joy of enabling opportunities for farmers around the world. The social enterprise approach of creating symbiotic social, economic, and environmental benefits was enlightening.

A few years later, I swung back to California. I continued working on sustainable agriculture at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. For seven years, I worked on Packard’s Agriculture, Livelihoods, and Conservation program, which provided grants to organizations blazing pathways on improving smallholder farmer livelihoods in ways that also conserved tropical forests. This has now morphed into a broader program on the role of tropical forests in global climate action.

Forests, particularly tropical forests, are key for a cooler climate. Forests naturally absorb carbon dioxide and methane, two greenhouse gasses that cause climate change. But deforestation dumps 1.2 billion tons of carbon into our atmosphere each year, accounting for 10% of carbon emissions( Our World in Data) Supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities in their pursuit to preserve tropical forests is central to the Packard Foundation’s Global Climate Initiative (GCI), which is part of a broader Forests, People, Climate (FPC) global collaborative. Both aim to provide civil society with resources to halt and reverse deforestation in the world’s largest tropical forest areas in the Brazilian Amazon, Congo Basin, and eastern Indonesia.

Now, as I co-lead our global climate team in resourcing and supporting over a hundred NGO partners, I feel more connected to the groundswell of collective climate action occurring around the globe. With over a decade into this new environmental sector career path, I feel more motivated and determined to support others in merging social, environmental, and economic justice. I continue to think about my roots, how my past helps decipher what I’m thinking in the present, and how learning about others’ origin stories helps us all better understand our personal missions and visions.

[The blog post was published on WordPress. Original image by Jennifer Bourn. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons CC0.]