ABOUT US
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I am because we are
Pachaysana is a collective of Ecuadorian and international educators, nature restorers, teaching artists, and community organizers.
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We bring together our diverse knowledge and experiences to re-imagine the dominant models of education and land use in our world. We create just alternatives through innovative educational and environmental programming.
WHAT WE DO
SOCIAL JUSTICE
Education is created, not received.
We explore and transform conflicts through an ongoing and creative dialogue among diverse voices with the ultimate goal of liberating ourselves from systemic and embodied injustices. We do this by co-constructing educational spaces of community, creation and celebration where true dialogue takes place. This dialogue is rooted in humanizing methodologies such as theater of the oppressed, popular pedagogy, decolonizing education, and art for social change.
We strive to constantly re-imagine what education can be, and how it can incentivize social justice. We do this through various educational programs, such as: semester-long study abroad, short-term study abroad, and Unlearning workshops, webinars and consultancies. We interconnect local and global realities, theory and practice, and the university and the community. Local, Ecuadorian partner communities are key participants and co-creators of all our programming.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
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Live with the forest, not from the forest.
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We believe that Environmental Justice is only possible if we change how we perceive and relate to our environment. A sustainable life on this planet will never be feasible as long as we treat forests, mountains and rivers as "natural resources." We must learn from other ways of knowing and see (and feel) them as our homes, our relations, our ancestors, or as part of ourselves. In this way, we transition from living from the forest to living with the forest, or some would even say to living as the forest.
In this sense, we are re-designing what ecosystem restoration means. We are part of the ecosytem and that means we must restore ourselves just as much as we restore a forest. We call it "re-storying" ourselves and the planet. Our Humans for Abundance program links local restorers with co-restorers from around the world to create healthier ecosystems and community livelihoods. Our Forest School program combines ancestral and traditional schooling, training local youth to be the leaders of the restoration movement.
our vALUES
Pluriversality. We are co-designers of the pluriverse, where multiple ways of understanding the world, of knowing, and of being are valid and valued. We reimagine diversity as pluriversity, treating others as they want to be treated and celebrating marginalized voices.
Balance. We are constantly seeking balance, a creative process realized in interconnection with all living beings.
Justice. We seek to dismantle oppressions and create just alternatives. Our resistance is rooted in collective creation. We act in solidarity, recognizing that our struggles and movements are interwoven.
Celebration. We party in community. If there isn’t dancing, it isn’t revolution.
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our name
Our name, Pachaysana, is the fusion of two Kichwa words: Pacha means World (Earth, or the continuum of Time & Space) and Aysana means Balance.
The name is indicative of our values: we seek to create a world in balance. For us, this world is rooted in justice and created through a collective process with all living beings. To create a more balanced world, we must first create more just and balanced relationships.
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our Mission & Vision
M To reimagine education and environmental justice as collective creations to foster liberation and unlearn embodied and systemic injustice
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V To be a driving force in the minga* of interconnected community struggles, linking together the local, the global and the natural world for collective liberation
*Minga is an ancestral form of community work that originated in the Andes & is rooted in collective wellbeing and reciprocity, rather than monetary compensation. It comes from the Kichwa term, "Maki Puray" or "lending a hand."
our team
Executive Director
María José Iturralde, better known as Chochi, is a passionate Ecuadorian social entrepreneur and educator working since 2017 to increase the biodiversity and balance of key ecosystems as much as the wellbeing of their human inhabitants, especially those from vulnerable Indigenous communities. She is the director of Pachaysana’s project Humans for Abundance which focuses on opening up new paths for people to access a better life while contributing positively to their environment.
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At the beginning of her career as an educator, she learned what causes human beings to behave the way they do and the support that people need in order to switch negative behaviors into positive. She is now applying this knowledge into the environmental work she does with marginalized communities in the Amazon Rainforest and other areas of Ecuador. This work has taught her that environmental justice cannot exist without social justice, which is the reason she designed Humans for Abundance’s social approach to environmental restoration.
Director of Education and Development
Daniel is an educator, artist, and activist specializing in participatory theatre as a tool for education, dialogue, and conflict transformation. Originally from the United States, he has lived in Ecuador for more than twenty-five years, working alongside Indigenous and other frontline communities in both rural and urban regions.
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He is the founder of Pachaysana’s Rehearsing Change and Unlearning programs and an active scholar-practitioner of Participatory Action Research, applying narrative and arts-based methods to co-generate knowledge with local communities. His work centers on unlearning, decolonizing methodologies and pedagogy, epistemological pluralism, and theatre for social change.
Beyond his community-based work in Ecuador, Daniel regularly lectures and facilitates workshops at universities across the United States. He has served as a Visiting Professor and Baker Fellow in Peace and Conflict Studies at Juniata College, taught in Graduate Education Studies at Providence College, and served as a Guest Instructor at Wesleyan University. In Ecuador, he teaches at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. ​Daniel previously co-founded the internationally recognized cultural-education organization Fundación Quito Eterno and conducted research as a Fulbright Scholar in Quito. He holds an MA in Education from the University of Tulsa and an MFA in Theatre from UCLA.
Community & Education Coordinator
Daniel is a cultural organizer and member of Fundación Pachaysana and the community of Pintag Amaru. He has worked closely with communities across Ecuador—especially in the Amazon and the Andes—promoting educational initiatives that weave together the arts and the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples.
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He currently co-leads the Rehearsing Change program with Pachaysana and collaborates on projects focused on ancestral wisdom, oral memory, and the restoration of Mother Earth. These initiatives are carried out with partner communities, always grounded in the care of the forest, water, and collective identity.
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He also facilitates spaces for collective creation and healing, inviting participants to rethink their relationship with history, art, and life.
Resident Director
Sarah Lyon is an Art Historian who specializes in contemporary Andean textiles; she graduated from Williams College with a BA in Art History and a concentration in Latin American Studies. She is currently completing a master’s degree in Cultural Studies with a focus on Cultural Policy at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, Ecuador. Using decolonial and participatory action research methods, she has been studying the collective rights that the Quechua weavers of Cusco have to the intellectual property of their textiles.
While originally from the US, Sarah has worked and studied in Ecuador and Peru for nine years. In Peru she was the Coordinator of the Education Department at the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco (CTTC), a non-profit founded and run by indigenous women where she continues to serve as board member. With CTTC, Sarah often served as a bridge between cultures, organizing projects that involved people from many different walks of life. Situated in this frontier position, she was forced to recognize the stereotypes, stigmas, and professional superiority that both national and international partners assumed when working with the weavers. Such experiences inspired Sarah to come to Quito and study alongside scholars and students from across Latin America. With Pachaysana she hopes to guide students in purposeful study with the Global South as opposed to treating the region as an object of investigation.
Assitant Administrative Director
Andrés is, by profession, an accountant, but is truly a jack of all trades. Originally from the city of Tulcán in the province of Carchi in the north of Ecuador, he currently lives in Puembo on the outskirts of Quito where he is a student at the Universidad Central del Ecuador. Andrés is finishing the final semester of his Accounting and Auditing major and is excited to bring his new skills to working with community organizations. His passion for local, grass-roots collectives led him to participate in forest restoration projects with programs such as Humans for Abundance (H4A) where he has been
involved in both the administrative and accounting side as well as the sociocultural side, working alongside members of the Mushullakta community located in the Upper Amazonian province of Napo. With H4A Andrés has been managing and coordinating reforestation efforts for more than three years. He has also worked with community leaders in Mushullakta to teach them how to manage their accounts, a computerized system for their finances, and how to manage the finances of the Forest School for community children. Apart from H4A, Andrés has also worked on the accounting and administrative end of such organizations as Terraformation.
Besides his office skills, Andrés is also a skilled - and self-taught - carpenter. When not working alongside community members or the Pachaysana team on administrative issues, Andrés is happy making furniture for community spaces. Many of his chairs, tables and desks now grace the new community café and Forest School classroom in Mushullakta.
Research Coordinator
Belén is Assistant Professor of Human Geography at Penn State University. She is a scholar, activist, and educator with fifteen years of experience working with rural and indigenous communities in social development and educational projects in Ecuador. After concluding her Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Oregon, she worked as a post-doctoral Mellow Foundation Fellow gearing her research towards a better understanding of race and gender violence in the Amazon region, and then as a World/Just Transformations Postdoctoral Scholar at Penn State
University, where she collaborated with Indigenous and rural women resisting oil extraction in the Amazon of Ecuador. These collaborations bridged marginalized communities with a wider public interested in social and epistemic justice.
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Belén’s research engages Indigenous and rural epistemologies as educational methodologies to make evident the ways in which situated bodies, Indigenous knowledge, oil infrastructure, and grassroots struggles are embedded in larger hegemonic socio-spatial realities and dynamics. As Pachaysana's Research Coordinator, Belén is applying her work to Pachaysana’s educational model and will be making the results available to both U.S college students and rural communities in Ecuador. This collaboration includes the participation of students and community members in activist research, and it also focuses on improving teaching methodologies among Pachaysana's educators.
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She has taught for Beloit College, The University of Oregon, and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Belén is a co-founder of the Pachaysana Institute and the Quito Eterno Foundation
Workshop Facilitator
Activist, educator, youth worker, and artist at heart, Chelsea Viteri was born and raised in Quito, Ecuador. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts with a major in Theater Arts and a minor in International Development. Her Masters’ degree is in Community Development and Planning. Currently she is the Program Coordinator for the Global Studies program at Washington University in St. Louis
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A youth worker and community organizer for 15 years, Chelsea has worked with diverse communities in both
Ecuador and the United States, utilizing artistic expression, including theatre, music, poetry and documentaries, as a means for collective empowerment and creative conflict transformation. Chelsea is also active as a scholar-practitioner. Her earlier work focused on the gendered impacts of extractive industries in communities of Latin America. Most recently she led Pachasyana's projects in Participatory Action Research, co-authored research on Decolonizing Risk Management and developed Pachaysana’s gender and transformative justice policies.
our Board Members
Daniel Acosta,
President
Chelsea Viteri,
Vice President
María Belén Noroña
Daniel Bryan
Daniel is a community educator who draws on Theatre of the Oppressed and other applied theatre methodologies for social change, helping communities address conflict and imagine alternatives through storytelling, performance, music, hip hop, painting, and diverse artistic expressions.
Special Programs Coordinator
Paula is a conservation biologist, communicator, and nature lover. She has extensive experience in ecological research, particularly focusing on the effects of global change on species ecology from a biogeography perspective, based on her research during her B.Sc. in Ecuador and her M.Sc. at the Université François Rabelais de Tours in France. Later, she broadened this perspective to include bioacoustics and physiology in her research, and she is currently finishing her Ph.D. at the Universidad de Costa Rica.
Throughout her career, Paula has actively searched for funding for research projects and has remained deeply committed to promoting and conserving Ecuador’s rich cultural and natural diversity. She has been involved in science communication and educational programs since 2018, when she became a grantee of Bat Conservation International (BCI) and a National Geographic Explorer. These opportunities have enabled her to work on multidisciplinary projects that combine her scientific, communication, and educational backgrounds. Her diverse experience has highlighted the importance of making biological research accessible and inclusive to people beyond academia, and her work in education and communication has strengthened her connection to the social dimensions of nature conservation. Her goal is to inspire people to reconnect with nature and gain a deeper understanding of it, while valuing the knowledge and leadership of the communities on the frontlines of conservation.
Director of Curriculum, Children of the Living Forest
Esteban was born in Ecuador, in an Afro-descendant community, and his life’s work is rooted in antiracist praxis, the defense of Afro-Ecuadorian rights, and the pursuit of historical reparation. He holds a master’s degree in Cultural Studies with a specialization in Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and has built his career as an educator, activist, and pedagogue. Through cultural practice, he develops and promotes critical perspectives and alternative ways of knowing that invite new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in relation to pedagogy, decolonization, and social change.
He currently resides in Tolontag, Pintag, where he continues to advance antiracist, decolonial, and liberatory educational projects. Esteban has worked as a professor, researcher, and scholar at the Technical University of Carchi, as well as in various secondary schools in Quito. He also collaborated with the Secretariat of Intercultural Education, designing a national curriculum for Afro-descendant communities. Drawing on his background in Language and Literature Pedagogy, Curriculum Design, Theatre, and Film, he is now developing a curricular proposal for the Kichwa community of Mushullakta in the Amazon.