Far Away Projects

Want to join us in making a difference? We're raising money to benefit the Sudan Art and Design Library project, and any donation will help make an impact. Thanks in advance for your contribution to this cause that means so much to us.

More information about Sudan Art and Design Library: We believe in the power of art to lift a people and provide them with a window to the world. Making references and facilities to create new art available to the public is imperative. We hope that this grassroots effort will reinforce the values of tolerance, civic participation, and democratic engagement.

For more info, check us out at:
AR: https://sudanartanddesignlibrary.com/
EN: https://sudanartanddesignlibrary.com/en

Give life to the founding year of operation for The Trauma Project, a new fiscally sponsored non-profit who's vision is a world free from abuse; emotional, physical and sexual. Our mission is to empower those impacted by trauma and create lasting social reform to end abuse.

This is not a sad story. This is a story of humanity’s courage, resilience, purpose, and love. Join us in rewriting and reclaiming the narrative. 

What your funds will help us do in ONE year.

Your donation will play a role in breaking the normalization of abuse, give voice to those suffering in silence, provide community for those who are alone, and provide resources to those who need help. 

If 1,000 people donate $100, this non-profit will be able to operate for a year and develop the programs below: 

 - Anonymous No More: A podcast series that tells the story of 24 trauma survivors and reveals the diverse and yet common occurrences of abuse against women, children, and men. These stories break the silence that stifles many people who have been abused, empowering them and listeners. Sharing these stories heal the individual and society.

 - Trauma Empowerment Circles: Monthly private meetings and a global network for those who are being abused to signal for help and receive support. This breaks the harmful illusion of isolation and creates a community of belonging. 

 - Beautiful Wisdom: Educational programs working with physicians and therapists to share training, education, and wellness practices so that all may access steps to healing and integration. An 8-week trauma program designed to begin anyone on their path to reshaping and integrating their relationship with trauma. 

- The Trauma Project Website: A beautifully illustrated, interactive and immersive web property to  break the social stigma around abuse and help society redefine it's relationship to trauma. 

By changing the global story and impact of trauma we reclaim the health and happiness of society. 


About The Trauma Project

-The vision is a world free from abuse; emotional, physical and sexual. 

-The mission is to work with those who have been abused to empower, create awareness, and build community and safe spaces. 

-The purpose is to fuel a movement, a women's movement, a human rights movement, a movement to create lasting social reform and end abuse. 


How you can stay involved? 

You'll be added to our mailing list and kept updated once a month with our progress in the world. Feel free to unsubscribe or let us know if you'd like to be involved in our evolution. 

What do we stand for?

-We stand for the safety of all bodies, minds, and hearts. We stand for the present and future of all children. We stand for abuse against all beings. 

-We stand for our right and responsibility to say no to all human violations. We stand for freedom. 

-We stand for pathways to progress, health, peace, and harmony. 

-We stand for the Age of Courage, to heal the hardest parts there are to heal. 


5 Reasons to donate?

Because you…

1) Believe in Teresa

2) Believe in those who have been abused

3) Have experienced abuse and believe in yourself

4) Believe in a world free of abuse

5) Have the means and want to distribute it to places that will make a difference


Who's behind The Trauma Project? 

Teresa Yung is the founder of The Trauma Project. Her life mission and purpose is to change the normalization of abuse and trauma and create a new world where support, harmony, and peace is the foundation of our relationships. When she was young, from the age of 3+, her boundaries were crossed on a regular basis and her sense of safety, trust, body, and voice were shattered. Her life’s work has been developing an intimate understanding of her journey with trauma and self-care. She has spent 10+ years working within start-up's and wellness, interweaving her skills across human and organizational development.  She cares deeply for all those in the world who have also experienced abuse.


Your Donation: Tax-Deductible! 

The Trauma Project is sponsored by Far Away Projects who believe in scaling grassroots solutions. By nurturing local ideas, they hope to accelerate a more sustainable and equitable future for all life on Earth. They connect organizations and individuals doing brave work in a variety of fields, with their international counterparts; in doing so, we strengthen the global community addressing resource shortages, climate change, injustice and economic challenges.

What can we do to help coral reefs survive a changing environment?

Coral reefs are among the most complex and threatened ecosystems on earth, and our attempts to understand their mechanics have mostly failed to yield actionable information. On a global scale, it is clear that reefs are declining, in terms of health and extent. On local and regional scales however, we see differential responses by reefs to environmental change. We’ve observed some reefs improving, some reefs declining, and sometimes mixes of good and poor health in small geographic areas that are subjected to the same environmental conditions. In this unaccounted for heterogeneity is our lack of fundamental knowledge about coral reef dynamics – and also a source of optimism!

Why do some reefs recover from a harmful event when others don’t? Why are there diseased reefs right next to healthy reefs? These are questions we don’t have strong answers for yet.

Research to Action

The Batangas region of the Philippines has extremely high marine biodiversity and also high levels of anthropogenic impact. It is near Manila, one of the largest cities on Earth, suffers from destructive fishing practices, poor waste treatment, agricultural and industrial runoff from the land, and many other human-made stressors to reefs. Given the dominant paradigms in coral reef ecology, we would assume the reefs in the area are in severely degraded states or gone completely. In reality, this region has some of the healthiest and most resilient reefs on our planet – a true hope spot! Understanding what makes this area thrive under stressful conditions is essential to understanding how we can save other reefs. We strongly suspect that local upwellings (water currents that bring deep water to the surface) and oceanic currents are delivering cold, nutrient rich and acidic waters to the area. Even though these things are usually considered bad for reefs, in this case we suspect they are bolstering their resilience to stress. We are able to create artificial upwellings, which is a promising technology for helping reefs survive climate change! We first have to determine if upwellings are the driver of reef resilience in this region, and whether reefs that aren’t accustomed to these fluctuations in temperature, pH and nutrient levels will tolerate them. This project is the first step to assessing whether artificial upwellings are a viable technology to use on vulnerable coral reefs.

Evidence-based experimentation with new technology is going to be an important tool for conserving reefs worldwide, but understanding why reefs are what they are is what will facilitate conservation without the need for intervention.

Research to Knowledge

Coral reefs are complex systems that are usually treated like simple linear systems when they are studied. Coral reefs exhibit nonlinear and nonequilibrium behavior including chaos, feedbacks, multistabilities, cascading effects, phase shifts, and emergent phenomena. Our observations of coral reef systems are low dimensional by necessity, but these small windows in space and time are particularly susceptible to mirage patterns, which are artifacts of observing a mixed scale of nonlinear dynamics and analyzing these linearly. Patterns and order emerge at different scales to the mechanisms of their constituents, so modeling mechanisms is only meaningful at a specific and well-defined scale. Understanding the boundaries and integration of these scales is how we will be able to develop general conclusions and predictions about the system as a whole, instead of just its parts.  

For example, we know certain types of organisms are often around when a reef is doing well, but we also see these organisms associated with heavily degraded reefs. These types of correlations are often interpreted to be causal drivers of ecosystem dynamics, when it is more likely that they are ‘important’ only at a particular scale in space and time. If we were to scale in or out, their significance would disappear. In a complex ecosystem like a coral reef, a functional relationship between two types of organisms is not enough to identify a fundamental pattern for the whole system, because the relationships and actors will change and rearrange in order to cope with new environmental regimes. Almost all coral reef science uses assumed relationships between variables in the reef ecosystem (like percent coral cover and temperature) to try to understand them, and those assumptions lead to large errors. Another approach is to identify the physical rules governing the system, and then investigate the way biological systems can optimize energy partitioning within those constraints. This framework is analogous to treating a coral reef like an ‘ecosystem metabolic pathway,’ which deals with the flows of energy through a whole system, instead of one thing affecting one thing. This approach allows us to identify deep patterns in the way reef ecosystems are organized, and will allow us to forecast what will happen in the future more than presumptive mechanistic models.

This project is a pilot study for the region and will establish research protocol for future work in this area. It has two primary research objectives, one practical and one theoretical, to cope with both the urgency of the coral reef crisis and the need to develop better foundational knowledge:

1.     Understand the role of upwellings and currents in the health and resilience of Batangas coral reefs

2.     Investigate how metabolic efficiency scales from microbial cells to assemblages to whole coral reef ecosystems

The primary benefits of investigating these are to:

1.     Establish critical foundational knowledge that is needed to experiment with artificial upwellings – a technology with potential to save threatened reefs

2.     Establish a theoretical basis for energy flow through coral reefs and meaningful scales of observation – both essential for correctly understanding dynamics

Budget

The budget covers all operational expenses for the principal investigator and research assistant for 10 days of fieldwork. Please see methods for a comparison between observational only and observational + sampling fieldwork.

Observational Only
Flights: 1200
Lodging: 800
Boat Fees: 2000
10% unexpected expense: 400
Total: 4400

Observational + Sampling
Flights: 1200
Lodging: 800
Boat Fees: 2000
Shipping Fees: 300
Sampling Equipment: 1000
Analysis: 700
10% unexpected expense: 600
Total: 6600

Methods Overview

Observational
18 study sites are distributed along a gradient of upwelling influence. Some sites are completely within the upwelling range, some are partially exposed to upwelling waters, and some are not exposed but still within a similar environmental context.

100m belt transects will be photographed at a resolution of 1m. Three transects will be completed for each of three depth contours at 5m, 10m and 15m depths for a total of nine transects per study site. The photographs will be analyzed for macroscopic diversity and size distributions for each species. Video transects will be completed for fish surveys along the same transect lines. Fish diversity, abundance, and size distributions will be analyzed from video. Measurements of temperature, salinity, and pH will be recorded for each transect.

Sampling (funding dependent)
Water samples will be collected for each study site and analyzed for dissolved oxygen, pCO2, zooplankton diversity and abundance, phytoplankton diversity and abundance, dissolved inorganic nitrogen, dissolved inorganic phosphorous, iron concentrations, and chlorophyll a and b concentrations.

If permits are issued, coral specimens will be collected to assess skeletal health and growth rates.

If permits are issued, drone surveys will be performed over each study site to assess bulk properties of coral reef structure, composition, and oceanographic properties.

**This project overview is intended for a general audience, please message directly with any technical questions or comments!**


Far Away Projects is organized to advance environmental sustainability, make education and science available to the underprivileged, increasing the availability of nutritious foods in food deserts, and support public benefit initiatives.