If you have any inquiries, please contact jeremy@sustainabilitynetwork.ca.
*All recordings are available for 60 days.
Date: June 24, 1-2 PM ET
Cost: Free (Zoom Webinar)
*All registrants will be provided with a link to the recording and presentation slides following each session. Recording will be available for 60 days.
The RAD Network is an Indigenous-led national network that emerged through cultivating the “social soil” through relationship building, ceremony, and the willingness to stay in "not knowing" long enough for something new to emerge. This session tells the story of how the RAD Network came into being, and what that story might offer to the broader ENGO community.
The RAD Network emerged from the seeds that were planted by the Indigenous Circle of Experts and the Conservation Through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP). RAD emerged to help bridge the needed funding gap to advance Canada's 30 by 30 commitment through the support of Indigenous-led conservation, such as Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) by advancing Indigenous-led natural climate solutions (NCS) and conservation economies across Canada.
Three presenters - spanning Indigenous leadership, Wise Practice facilitation, and the catalyzing research that helped weave it all together - will bring different voices to one shared story. Together they will address questions at the heart of the CSIF: How do you build trust with communities whose experience of institutions has been harmful? How do you professionalize without losing your grassroots roots? What does it look like to advance work in a good way inside a movement that is itself still becoming?
The Climate Solutions Innovation Forum is a multi-year program that highlights newer innovative environmental nonprofits who share the story to inspire emerging leaders and/or to expose seasoned leaders to new ways of affecting change and reaching new audiences. CSIF shines a light on less traditional policy-oriented NGOs, youth led organizations as well as recently emerged culturally-focused ENGOs.
We thank the Ivey Foundation for their funding support of this series.
Our Presenters
Steven Nitah is Managing Director at Nature for Justice and leads their First 30x30 Canada program. A member and former Tribal Chief of the Łutsël K'é Dene First Nation, Steven served as the Nation's lead negotiator in the creation of Thaidene Nëné — "The Land of the Ancestors." He was a core member of the Indigenous Circle of Experts, contributing to the landmark "We Rise Together" report, and a Leadership Circle member of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership. Steven is the original founder of the RAD Network and remains a strategic anchor on its Leadership Circle and a leading national voice for Indigenous-led conservation and climate economies.
Erin Dixon is the Wise Practice Director of the RAD Network, where she facilitates ethical space, relational governance, and knowledge-sharing across Indigenous Nations and partner organizations. She is the current steward of the RAD Vision Basket as it travels its snake dance across Turtle Island. Erin comes from Bineshii Okaningaming (Skeleton Lake) on Anishinaabeg Robinson-Huron and Williams Treaty lands, and shares through her Otipemisiwak Cree-Métis and Icelandic-Isles kinship. She is lead faculty in Indigenous Leadership at the Banff Centre, an Associate Professor at Royal Roads University, and co-founder of the Bineshii Okanin Centre for Sacred Places.
Mary-Kate Craig is a catalyst, researcher, and community organizer who supported the emergence of the RAD Network. Her doctoral research at the University of Guelph (PhD, Geography, Environment and Geomatics, 2026) documents the aspirations, barriers, and pathways needed to enable Indigenous-led natural climate solutions in Canada, and the emergence of RAD as an act of relational and decolonial praxis. She is a non-Indigenous woman seeking to work in right relations, she brings a holistic systems lens to field-building and transformation at the intersection of climate change, biodiversity, and reconciliation and has spent a decade helping create the conditions for something new to emerge.
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