About The Pacific Mountain Institute
The mission of the Pacific Mountain Institute is to foster innovative solutions for complex social and environmental problems, with a primary focus on researching, developing, and incubating projects that are based on social entrepreneurship. The purpose of focusing on social entrepreneurial projects is two-fold; first it provides a path for individual project to be self-sustaining and thus deliver services more consistently over time, and secondly it places the emphasis on engaging the general public as key decision-makers for addressing social and environmental issues.
Traditionally, complex social and environmental problems have been approached by the government, business, education, and non-profit sectors in a piecemeal fashion. More recently, integrated, cross-disciplinary, multi-sector approaches have been developed that have provided more sustained success. However, gaining the support of the general public for tackling complex social and environmental issues remains a challenge.
Ongoing Projects
RiverBasins.org
The first project under development is a geographically based website for coordinating multi-stakeholder efforts at environmental conservation and restoration. This online community for coordinating environmental management efforts will be operated as a stand-alone website available to the general public at any time at www.riverbasins.org.
As this project develops further, it will serve as a repository and summary for the general public of the data and information provided by diverse stakeholders on the complexity involved in the environmental management of a particular geographical region such as a watershed or river basin.
Gear to Grow
The Gear to Grow Program allows outdoor retailers and manufacturers to donate gear for a tax deduction and for the benefit of educating the public and getting more people involved in outdoor recreation. Simply put, we broker gear between the donors and organizations getting people involved in the outdoors.
Filling the Gap
As we were working on the paperwork for tax exempt status for the Pacific Mountain Institute, John and I had numerous discussions about what we were trying to accomplish with this entity. At one point I described a perspective that I think summarizes where we hope to fill a gap.
When looking at environmental and social problems, there have traditionally been two approaches: Top down regulations and legislation from government entities and Bottom up grass roots efforts by the public. While both of these avenues for effecting change have seen varying amounts of success there remains a gap in effectiveness between the two approaches.
Governments can not and should not regulate decisions made by individuals that fall within their rights to have free choice. Governments should and do protect individuals from unsafe and destructive behavior in a broad sense, but on individual decisions like how much energy an individual uses to heat his or her house, the government has no role.
- corey's blog
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More Coming Soon
Over the next several weeks and months, this site will provide more detail about the Pacific Mountain Institute and its projects. Please come back to check on our progress.
- pacmtn's blog
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