Samir Doshi believes that in order to restore and conserve healthy ecosystems, social systems are just as significant as natural ones. And social systems at the community level are the most powerful. It is at this level where successful, and long-term, conservation can flourish.

Samir’s vision is one that has evolved from spending ten years in the environmental non-profit community. His experience has taken him on a variety of adventures around the world. He has worked with groups like Engineers without Borders, where he worked on a wide variety of projects-- from building well systems in Kenya to working on rainwater harvesting and water filtration systems in Thailand to teaching permaculture workshops for public in New Zealand. Samir also helped establish a local non-profit school in Kerala, India for underprivileged children, worked as a farmer and educator at Navdanya for Vandana Shiva, and volunteered at Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India for His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama as a teacher and dishwasher.

Samir used his TogetherGreen fellowship to infuse the word ‘justice’ into the fabric of conservation. He believes that the place where justice and conservation meet is in our communities. To do this, he created and hosted a series of workshops to teach communities how to earn an income from stewarding their environment. Through his fellowship and position as the Sustainability Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, Samir’s work helps empower communities to reconnect to their local ecosystems.