Tanya Ginwala

Tanya is a psychologist, outdoor facilitator, and adventure and nature-based therapy practitioner. For the past decade, she has been exploring how our relationships with the natural world shape our health and wellbeing. She sees today's crises of mental health, climate injustice, biodiversity loss and social fragmentation as connected, all pointing to one truth: the wellbeing of people, animals, communities and ecosystems is intertwined. Many Indigenous and place-based communities have long lived by this understanding, developing practices and rituals of care, reciprocity and interdependence through close relationships with land, water, animals and the seasons.

Through her Champions project, Tanya will bring together community knowledge holders, nature-based practitioners and mental health professionals to learn from one another. Community partners and practitioners will jointly design ethical guidelines and workshops to gather stories and practices of nature, wellbeing, care and coexistence from a range of ecological and cultural settings. These will shape a bilingual, open-source guide for use in both community and mental health settings, which will be tested in workshops and shared back with the communities involved. Guided by reciprocity, informed consent and community authorship, the project aims to make community knowledge more visible, help contributors build facilitation skills, and bring nature and coexistence more fully into wellbeing practice. In Tanya's words, it is an invitation to remember our way back to the right relationship with nature, with each other and with ourselves.