Our Roots & Legacy: 30 Years of Eco-Action and Education

Founded in 1996, Cloud Forest Institute (CFI) emerged from bold experiments in online learning and global exchange. Our earliest educational initiatives began in MIT’s Globewide Network Academy, pioneering virtual classrooms. Quickly evolving into real-world action, by 2000, we launched our first immersive service-learning program in Ecuador through California State University, Monterey Bay, sparking decades of transformative educational programming.

In 2002, CFI became a federally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit and expanded its mission to include fiscal sponsorship for grassroots initiatives worldwide. That same year, we joined frontline efforts in Mindo, Ecuador to resist the OCP Oil Pipeline, working alongside local allies to defend the Chocó Andino cloud forest.

Over the years, we have provided umbrella support to dozens of projects spanning the globe from Nepal to Africa, and especially locally in Mendocino County—amplifying community-led efforts in environmental restoration, education, and social justice.

In 2006, CFI co-founded the Amazon Mycorenewal Project (now CoRenewal), helping pioneer community-based mycoremediation techniques using oyster mushrooms to address oil pollution in the Amazon Basin.

Throughout the 2010s, we led interdisciplinary service-learning courses across Ecuador—connecting students with ecological restoration, sustainable building, and cultural exchange.

In California, we founded the MendoDragon Intentional Community, promote wildfire resilience through the Forest Reciprocity Group, and teach natural building and regenerative forestry through hands-on workshops.

From protecting over 4,000 acres of cloud forest in Paso Alto and Cambugán, to helping halt the OCP pipeline’s advance through the Mindo-Nambillo Protected Forest, from pioneering online education in the 1990s to publishing advocacy media and curriculum tools, our legacy is one of action, collaboration, and regeneration.