OUR MISSION

Culture exchange between Taiwanese Indigenous groups and the Seminole Tribe of Florida (2004)

Since its formation in 2001, the ATAYAL organization has shared the culture of Indigenous peoples to promote language and culture preservation. Through the sharing of culture, it can be brought to life, respected, and appreciated. Preserving the culture also preserves the wisdom and knowledge of the Indigenous peoples.

From our humble beginnings to our most ambitious projects, honoring and respecting the culture has been at the core of our activities. Over the years, the true value of Indigenous culture and widsom has come to light. The true value is its ability to transform and revitalize Indigenous communities, especially for the youth.

If you have any questions about our Mission, please contact us at this e-mail address.

Mission Statement | Problem | Solutions | Strategies | Capabilities | Benchmarks

PROBLEM

There are approximately 320 million Indigenous peoples from 5,000 distinct groups remaining in the world, each with their unique language and culture. Most of these languages and cultures are threatened with extinction, and the value of these losses would be immeasurable. But one thing is certain. Given the importance for humanity to live in harmony with the Earth, the value of Indigenous culture and wisdom should be considered priceless. Indigenous peoples, including Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and other groups around the world have a long history of colonialization, being forced to give up their traditional ways of life. When people struggle for survival, traditional culture and language education lose their priority to institutional education. Adults who gain an education and job skills typically leave their communities to seek jobs in the cities. As a result, Indigenous communities lose much of their young, productive adults, and the traditional culture and wisdom are left to wither and disappear.

STRATEGIES

Our strategy for executing our mission is reflected in the name of our program. By bridging communities, resources, academic institutions, and cultural events, there is no need to "reinvent the wheel," and our program benefits from a wealth of diversity.

Our organization embraces a streamlined and scalable growth strategy --- the Indigenous Bridges Youth Ambassador Program (IBYAP), which is a grass-roots, community-oriented approach that can be efficiently tested, executed, evaluated, and duplicated. Local communities can select and sponsor their own Indigenous Youth Ambassadors, provide on-site culture exchange, training and funding opportunities.

Our partnerships with academic institutions ensure that our organization has access to Indigenous students, grant funding, and connections to resources. We offer in return, transformational training for their students for sustainable community development sourced from from the Indigenous communities in our network. The accumulated knowledge of these communities is applied to serving the needs of these communities, presenting unique field work and research opportunities for the academic institutions.

Our partnerships with Indigenous communities ensures that our collective base of Indigenous knowledge and wisdom are shared for the revitalization of these communities. Our program encourages the young, education people respect, honor and preserve the local languages and traditions while developing sustainable jobs and restoring local ecologies.

Our program is designed to fully support the community-based activities with a three-tiered approach:

Cultural Exchanges for Relationship-Building + Meeting Spaces for Training + Real-World Projects for Practical Field Work

Through grass-roots cooperation, everyone involved will gain a sense of accomplishment, bringing together the past, present, and future to build a sustainable world, one community at a time.

BENCHMARKS

Our organization's Indicators of Progress will be based on these Objectives:

1. Recruiting and training more student delegates be qualified Indigenous Bridges Youth Ambassadors
2. Securing more MOUs for cooperation with Indigenous communities
3. Completing sustainable community development projects

Our primary measurement will be how many Indigenous youth delegated have been trained in our program. Our secondary measurement, which will be more long-term, is to measure the economic value produced by our community development projects. The economic value can be measured in terms of grants attracted, jobs produced and other benefits, such as carbon tax credits and blue carbon credits

For our own internal measurements, we will measure the ratio between our cultural exchange facilitation expenditures and our operational expenses. We will also encourage the hiring of Indigenous staff members, targeting a goal of at least 30%.