What We Do
Tohu exists to amplify the voices of indigenous communities around the world by interpreting, analysing, and utilizing data, insights, and research that to drive positive change. We advocate for indigenous communities by providing research and community backed solutions to industry leaders, bodies, and institutions, where the greatest change can begin.
Our work is centered in three interconnected areas
Our Theory of Change
Shifting institutional systems from maintaining life to participating in it.
To engage in acts of Adaptive Capacity. Allowing porosity and permeability to increase resilience and soften hierarchies.
From Sustainability to Sympoiesis - “making-with”
To move from sustaining the world as resource to co-creating worlds with it. Donna Haraway’s spores once whispered this term. It reminds us that nothing makes itself alone.
From Regeneration to Remembering - Stitching What Was Severed
To regenerate is to rebuild; to remember is to stitch back what was severed. Land, body, kin. Remembering invites relational repair beyond productivity. We aim to transform “impact assessment” into “remembering assessment’ so the metrics become not growth, but depth of reconnection. Begin measuring what cannot yet be optimized: trust, equity, reciprocity and transparency.
From KPIs to Responsibility and Reciprocal thriving
To create ecologies of accountability, not linear reports. Map the invisible ancestors of your work: indigenous teachers, extinct species, unpaid interns, mined cobalt, forgotten mothers.
From Resilience to Porosity -
The Art of Letting Systems Breathe
We want to tia (to steer) from concepts such as sustainability, regeneration, resilience as we believe these were once the polite incantations. They meant well, but they often stopped at maintenance: sustaining what was already dying, regenerating what was still owned, being resilient within systems that required constant harm.
This framework describes how Tohu moves institutional practice beyond maintenance logics—sustainability, regeneration, resilience—toward relational symbiosis: an operating system grounded in reciprocity among human and more-than-human partners. It provides a shared pathway for universities, NGOs, governments, and communities to integrate ethical, ecological, and epistemic transformation into their core missions.
Temporal Resilience –
Moving from One Speed of Progress
To propose flexible time architectures that mirror ecological regeneration rhythms. We commit to practice temporal equity to value those who move slower (elders, ecosystems) as much as those who move fast.
Our Principles
01
Relational Knowledge
Data are understood as expressions of relationship; analysis is an act of care, interpretation, and reciprocity.
02
Multiple Ways of Knowing
Indigenous, scientific, and experiential knowledges interact as distinct yet interconnected systems.
03
Ethical Grounding
Accountability is maintained to communities, ancestors, and lands, not only to institutional mandates.
04
Pattern Recognition
Tohu are read as signals of transformation — ecological, cultural, or institutional — rather than as isolated metrics.
05
Transformative Practice
The goal is not sustainability or resilience as maintenance logics, but regeneration as systemic renewal and rebalancing.
We collaborate with organisations, communities, governments, policymakers and research partners to cultivate nuanced, context-specific insights that integrate non-western methodologies with contemporary analytical tools. This approach enables more equitable, reflexive, and effective strategies that are capable of navigating complexity while remaining grounded in the ethics of place and relationship.
We actively engage in international forums on climate, justice and development issues and create frameworks and tools to enable indigenous inclusion in environmental and climate management and planning. We co-create multistakeholder teams of practitioners, scholars, artists, policy makers, planners and communities to tackle complex social ecological challenges such as climate adaptation planning, multicultural governance system, justice based supply chains, etc. We provide mentorship to youth, young scholars, early career professionals in socioenvironmental justice and develop context based educational content to address place based needs.