The longer we live, the more important it is we give back.
Understand that your lived experiences carry valuable data, insight, and wisdom that your community and loved ones would benefit from.
If only you would share it.
You're more influential than you'll ever know.
Pt. 1 | Stewarding
On the hour and a half boat ride back from our deepest dive yet, Kramer begins telling me about his childhood and his grandfather’s incredible impact on his life. As the waves spray salty mist onto the sides of our faces, he goes into detail about how one conversation with his grandfather shaped the trajectory of his entire life. He explains how his grandfather and mentor’s care made it possible for him to retire and become the founder of the Collective Approach to Restoring our Ecosystems (CARES) program where he dedicates his life to diving and pouring into the lives of those who care about making an impact in the world.
He’s telling me all of this as we’re sailing along the coast of Guanaja beneath a lush stretch of mountains. No wonder it’s called the Green Island, it’s tree-carpeted hills seem to never end.
Guanaja island is the virgin, protected and relatively undisturbed cousin of my mother’s neighboring island, Roatan. Known for its pristine beaches and once glorious coral reefs, Roatan is known as the crown jewel of Honduras’s Bay Islands, a world-renown tourist destination that for me has always presented two very distinct realities: one of privileged tourism, and the other of local and indigenous poverty.
I was in Guanaja to photograph Kramer’s CARES program, part of a Diving With A Purpose’s YICAP youth cultural exchange initiative.
Think of CARES as a climate action youth summer camp that brings young folks from Guanaja and the United States together for a couple weeks to conduct dive surveys and restore the health of the coral reefs in the Bay Islands of Honduras.
And this is just the beginning. This pilot program is designed to be adapted in other cliamte-vulnerable communities globally.
Kramer’s hope is to see the time investment he’s made into young lives through this initiative return ten-fold within his lifetime and beyond.
And I’m sitting there listening to his story thinking, wow, this is what sustainable purpose work looks like: future planning.
What becomes available when we lead with the resources, foresight and planning to be able to give back with abundance?
This is the question I am sitting with now.
Pt. 2 | How I Got Here
If you’ve read my letter about the photograph I’ll show my children, or how diving was my response to climate anxiety and saudade, or saw how South Africa changed my life, you know that I’m developing my skillset as an underwater storyteller.
My path to building a creative climate career has been challenging and it’s once-in a lifetime trips like these that make the journey worth it.
The alignment of my time photographing in Roatan and Guanaja has been monumental for my faith and hope for the future. It’s shown me the art of surrendering my purpose to God. Instead of doing all the hustle/networking/striving on my own - these opportunities came to me when I was not looking for them. These are answers to prayers I cried through. I know beyond doubt that God deserves all the glory in this.
And the best part?
I didn’t have to change a thing about who I was to receive this opportunity. In fact, begin exactly who I am, made this a perfect fit.
I was a Honduran-American photographer for climate, in Roatan on a work trip to photograph young Honduran and American divers being climate advocates. We visited the part of the island my family is from, and I couldn’t stop grinning as I walked beside our program’s founder, Ken Stewart, through the streets my grandmother raised my mom and uncles on.
What a full circle moment.
Pt. 3 | The Impact
This trip is a collaboration of US-based Diving With a Purpose with Guanaja-based Green Island Challenge, two non profit organizations invested in cultural and environmental conservation work powered by ambitious and curious youth. Each organization is led by volunteers who genuinely love the work they do and who all agree that leading with impact and purpose is a non-negotiable.
The data collected is passed along to scientific research and data centers to aid in climate change monitoring, and eventually adaptation.
Last year’s program was full of learnings, risks and new connections. This year’s program gave us so much insight, appreciation and endurance. The growth in each diver’s ability, familiarity with the course material and overall grasp of the program was phenomenal. This year I’ve seen our participants connecting with one another and the task of coral monitoring underwater with more ease. Where there was once awkwardness, there is now familiarity and kinship.
Pt. 4 | It Takes Time
A couple weeks ago I shared the truth about how long it took me to find an aligned community like DWP in my creative climate career journey. The light at the end of the tunnel of a very lonely transition into my climate appeared during a 2am google search that led me to this amazing diving community. DWP has opened my mind to what is possible when people with purpose come together across generations.
And it has shown me that it takes time, and several generations to steward impact.
Being in Honduras with so many different parts of my life convening at once had me thinking about the time it takes to grow something meaningful.
I’m blessed to have joined this mission for the second time as a photographer and diver earning my advanced diving certification while there. Through experiences like these, I am continually learning the art of time as care. I’m seeing that to build meaningful relationships that can grow and generate scaleable impact, it takes time and a willingness to return to work year in and year out.
So, if you’re reading this right now and are in one of those thankless and grueling phases of growth where immense progress and change seems impossible, you are not alone. To be discouraged is to have once been hopeful. Please do not stay defeated. Yours is the work of tending and maintenance. Keep your head up, you’ll need your vision steady. Purpose is always connected to something larger than yourself and you are not only building a space where history can grow, you’re planting roots so you can stay a while, pour out, and get poured into. A space designed to be a conduit, a pathway for a new world.
And that kind of lasting work friend, well that simply takes time for you and your impact to evolve and establish itself. There’s grace available for you in this process if ya care to slow down and grab it.
Your time is coming.
3 awe tings
This week’s section is dedicated to the theme of taking time to build something great. The film is a beautiful ode to moving at a pace that makes room for deep breaths and processing. And the two organizations I worked with in Honduras are investing time in changing the lives of climate-curious youth. Share these links, donate to their projects, recommend their work to your community. This is how we build.
🎞️ Every Dirt Road Tastes of Salt - the most poetic, slow paced films i’ve ever seen
🤿 Diving With A Purpose - Diving to preserve cultural archaeology and our reefs
Donate to sponsor more science-driven missions like ours in Honduras.
🦜Green Island Challenge - Eco conservationists doing the hard work year-round.
Donate to conserve Honduras’s ecosystems and expand their impact!
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