Why I’m Going to the Atacama
In November and December 2026, I will participate in Desert 23°S, an arts and ecology residency with La Wayaka Current near San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile. I am undertaking this residency as part of my professional development: a structured period of research, writing, listening, and reflection connected to the questions I carry in my work as a communications and philanthropy practitioner in Colorado.
La Wayaka Current is an artist-led organization working across ecology, local knowledge, and contemporary creative practice. Its residencies create space for artists, writers, researchers, activists, and cultural practitioners to engage with specific territories through careful observation, situated learning, independent work, guided field visits, and dialogue with local contexts. Desert 23°S is rooted in the Atacama Desert, a vast high-altitude landscape shaped by extreme aridity, volcanic plains, agricultural oases sustained by snowmelt, Indigenous cultural history, fragile ecosystems, and mounting pressure from mining, tourism, water scarcity, and climate change.
This is not recreational travel. I am approaching the residency as a professional development laboratory: a chance to step outside my usual institutional context and test how place-based learning can deepen my practice. For three weeks, I will be in a rural desert context, participating in a program that balances guided learning and cultural encounters with independent research, writing, and reflection. My work will focus on how communities in and around San Pedro de Atacama narrate their relationships to land, water, territory, ecological crisis, lithium extraction, tourism, cultural identity, and belonging.
The comparison I am carrying is between the Atacama and rural Colorado. These are not interchangeable places. They have distinct histories, cultures, political realities, legal frameworks, Indigenous nations and communities, economies, and relationships to land and water. But they do invite a shared set of questions. What happens when rural and desert communities are asked to absorb the consequences of decisions made elsewhere? How do people hold identity, memory, and self-determination in landscapes defined by scarcity or extraction? Who gets to define what counts as evidence, progress, adaptation, or sustainability? And what does it mean for philanthropy, media, and public institutions to support community power rather than simply describe community need?
As part of this residency, I expect to conduct research through observation, reading, writing, and conversations with people and organizations whose work is already grounded in the region. My developing interview interests include Indigenous governance and territorial rights; environmental justice and water; lithium extraction and the energy transition; community-rooted research and advocacy; cultural memory and language; tourism and self-representation; conservation finance; and how Chilean philanthropy and civil society think about decentralization beyond Santiago.
The creative output will likely take several forms: nonfiction essays, field notes, interview reflections, comparative sketches between the Atacama and Colorado, and practical learning products I can bring back into my professional work. I am especially interested in how stories shape what institutions notice, fund, measure, and value. In philanthropy, narrative is not ornamental. It influences whose expertise is recognized, whose suffering is made visible, whose solutions are legitimized, and whose futures become imaginable.
My goal is to use this experience to continue learning about global place-based philanthropy: how funders and institutions can better center community voice, especially in rural and Indigenous contexts; how they can avoid extractive approaches to learning and storytelling; and how they might shift from treating places as sites of intervention toward understanding them as sources of authority, knowledge, and imagination.
I am also using the residency to examine my own practice. What does it mean to enter a place respectfully as a writer? How do I listen without extracting? How do I compare without flattening? How do I carry what I learn back into institutional settings without turning someone else’s lived experience into a convenient lesson? These are not questions I expect to answer neatly. They are questions I want to stay accountable to.
That is why I am calling this work field notes. The phrase reminds me to observe before concluding, to stay close to place, to pay attention to contradiction, and to write from practice rather than certainty. The Atacama residency is one chapter in a larger professional inquiry into philanthropy, place, power, and stories — and into what more ethical, relational, and imaginative forms of social change work may require from those of us working inside institutions.
