My Journey to Community Activation

At Middle Path EcoSolutions, I help organizations, businesses, and entrepreneurs with their community engagement, development, and activation. One of the questions I often get asked is: How did I get on this career path? So, here is my story about how I got here, and the experiences and learning that brought me to community activation.

I’m first generation Thai-American. I grew up in a pretty tight-knit Southeast Asian-American Buddhist community in central Florida. The multicultural contrast of growing up in an extended Thai community in the conservative South of the US formed the bedrock of my emerging curiosity about how people live and work together in different environments and cultures. It was just the beginning of a journey that brought me to the community engagement and community activation work that I do today.

I fed my curiosity through lots of independent travel. Over the course of 15 years, I traveled on my own to Australia, across Asia (Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, China, Tibet, Nepal), the Middle East (Iran & Syria), Central America (Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama), and Brazil.

I spent weeks and months at a time wandering about with the intention of embedding myself as deeply as possible into the culture and environment of local communities. My goal was to learn what it was like to live as different people do.

I stayed with local families whenever they graciously offered, and spent at least a few days at a time under their wing. I found that I could blend in pretty easily into just about any place that I went. 

In parallel to my travels, I pursued my curiosity through academic learning. My first research experience was funded by a Fulbright scholarship in 2001 in Northeast Thailand, based out of Khon Kaen. I explored a village’s home gardens and learned how the plants in those gardens supported their cultural, spiritual, medicinal, and food needs. I was also part of a research team from Khon Kaen University (KKU) that partnered with journalists and photographers from Advanced Thailand Geographic. Together, we embarked on a year-long mission to learn about the ethnobotany of local communities in each of the 76 provinces in Thailand. It was a really deep dive into the fascinating world of local Thai communities, and how they shape and are shaped by their natural environment.

As soon as I completed the Fulbright scholarship, I began a Master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Botany at KKU. Our graduate research team worked together to create a comprehensive picture of the traditional medicine of ethnic minority groups in Northeast Thailand. For 3 years, I did annual weeks-long field excursions, staying in Kui ethnic communities and camping out by small watering holes for cattle. I methodically documented the collection practices and use of plants by herbalists, blowing doctors, and spiritual healers of the Kui (here’s the study, and a presentation with some great photos). I learned a lot about how local culture, beliefs, and environment really go hand in hand. It also opened up a lot of questions for me about how people manage their natural resources, while meeting their livelihood needs and working within their limitations. 

In 2007, I began a doctoral program in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at University of Florida. After exploring Brazil and Central America, I settled on working in Maranhão, Brazil to study how people make decisions about natural resource use and management within the context of a fast growing global market economy. My case study was among caboclo communities and their use and management of buriti (Maurita flexuosa) for making and selling handicrafts. I spent 6 years learning Brazilian Portuguese and completing that research. This work really broadened my perspectives about how the broader context (political, economic, socioeconomic) affects the way that people make decisions about their life. (I published a couple of articles about how socioeconomics and mobility affect how people extract buriti and engage in markets).

After earning my PhD in Interdisciplinary Ecology, I spent the next year working on international contracts. In Bocas del Toro, Panama with the School for Field Studies, I developed and taught an Environmental Management and Policy course to American undergraduates with a focus on social-ecological resilience and learning how to work with indigenous communities. I also developed and taught a field course on the socioeconomic dimensions of natural resource management for protected area managers in Amazonas, Brazil for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). This course focused on working with communities to understand and affect their behaviors exploiting forest resources. Finally, I took on a research project for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) looking at how Thai farmers, hill tribes, nonprofits, government, and intergovernmental agencies intersected and affected the management of sloping forest landscapes in Northern Thailand (resulting in this article). All of these experiences really deepened my perspectives about how tightly linked communities are to their environment and socio-political context. 

I also realized that it was important for me to share my knowledge about community engagement–and to help others learn about how to work with communities. 

I moved with my husband Mário to Boulder, Colorado in 2013 to take on a job at the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), where I looked at ways to increase the use of NEON products among diverse communities, and especially through the lens of social-ecological systems. The following year, I continued this work as a Post-doctoral researcher in community resilience at the University of Idaho. I led a paper entitled, A Social Ecological Systems Approach for Environmental Management that has become my most highly cited paper to date (91 citations). 

I became more deeply involved exploring the topic of community resilience (for both place-based and virtual communities). I received funding from the Research Data Alliance to pursue research questions about access to scientific data for place-based community resilience planning (with a case study in Boulder, CO). This research dove-tailed with my increasing participation in Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). With colleagues, we founded the Community Resilience cluster at ESIP in 2018, and today I continue to lead this group as Chair. 

After spending a few years gathering momentum through contract work as a sole proprietor, I established Middle Path EcoSolutions LLC in 2017 as a home for the community engagement work that I do. You can read here about why I chose Middle Path EcoSolutions as a business name. 

In 2020, after several years as an enthusiastic Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship, I took on the role of Community Director. With a community of over 400 Scholars around the world, the Ronin Institute has become a valuable testbed for developing my concept of online Community Activation. As a community of really smart, and deeply thoughtful and committed people, we’re making so many breakthroughs in the realm of online community engagement. Since I started building out the community at the Ronin Institute over a year ago, we’ve now got a community-based governance structure, over 20 new interest groups for collaborations, regularly scheduled events and newsletters, and the beginnings of a novel peer-to-peer support structure for research development.

My work at Middle Path is a synthesis and culmination of my heritage as a Thai-American, and the experiences I’ve had exploring and understanding the way that people live and work together in different cultures, context, and environments.

The techniques and approaches I use at Middle Path for community activation are informed by participatory and community-based concepts that I’ve seen really work in communities around the world. 

I truly believe that great community development, engagement, and activation can change the world. I hope that through my work at Middle Path that I can share with my clients some of the lessons I’ve learned about working with and engaging communities. Happily, my journey in community activation continues, and I can’t wait to discover and learn more with the communities I work with.