In Their Own Words

Kendall Dunnigan
Photo by Sashwa Burrows

My passions:

  • My family
  • Doing anything active with friends, especially hiking, gardening, kayaking, biking, Cuban salsa dancing, and gourd-crafting.
  • Chocolate (not necessarily in that order)

My work in 6 or fewer words:

Facilitate bio-culturally regenerative human systems design.

My favorite color: 

Dirt (in its many shades).

My preferred gender pronoun:

She or her.

My favorite resiliency resource:

Sun, wind, water, earth and all its inhabitants.

My work at OAEC:

I support place-based communities to design, implement, and evolve socially just and ecologically regenerative human settlement patterns based in natural systems and processes.

Why my work matters:

Two out of five people on the planet are water insecure today and that number will shoot upwards as the Himalayan glaciers and other glacier filled mountain ranges melt leaving large tracts of India and China and other snow-dependent water areas (such as California) without steady water flows. People all over world are already facing the impacts of climate chaos: larger storms, more flooding, longer droughts, less predictable weather systems, and crop failure. As climate chaos expands, more and more people will experience insecurity to their basic water and food needs. Every community has the right and the potential to address their ecological and economic needs and, ultimately, will be left to solve their own issues. I facilitate those processes that support communities to determine their needs, their ecological and social assets, and to re-weave themselves into reciprocal relationships with each other and upon which they depend.

Kendall Dunnigan