Monthly Spotlight: Plant Futures Initiative
This month, we spoke with Darleen Martinez, community and education coordinator at Plant Futures Initiative, an education and movement-building organization working toward more plant-forward food systems across Mexico and Latin America, and one of ACE’s Movement Grants recipients.
Far more resources on plant-forward food systems and animal advocacy exist in English than in Spanish. Plant Futures set out to change that, and found the work was bigger than translation. What they discovered along the way shaped how they now think about an animal-inclusive world, food, culture, and the long-term work of building a movement.
1. Could you introduce the Plant Futures Initiative and the core problem your work is trying to solve?
Plant Futures Initiative is an education and movement-building organization working to help create more plant-forward food systems by connecting the issues that shape how we eat, live, and relate to the world around us. We’re building a plant-centered future through Curriculum, Community, Careers, Culture Change, and Consulting.
Our work sits at the intersection of food, health, climate, justice, culture, and animal advocacy.
The problem we are trying to address is both educational and systemic. Food systems touch nearly every aspect of our lives, yet the people who have the power to transform them are often educated in silos. A health professional may learn about nutrition without learning how food environments are shaped by policy and economics. An environmental educator may study climate without examining agriculture or animal welfare. An advocate may care deeply about animals without having opportunities to explore the connections between animal suffering, food systems, land, labor, health, and climate.
There is also a significant language and resource gap. There are far more resources available in English than in Spanish around plant-forward food systems, animal advocacy, and related areas. But this is not simply a matter of translating existing information. Through our research in Mexico, we found limited educational standards, learning outcomes, competencies, and pedagogical frameworks that bring these issues together in ways that are culturally and contextually relevant to Mexico and Latin America.
Plant Futures is working to help fill that gap. We develop educational experiences and resources that allow people to connect across disciplines, languages, and generations, while also recognizing the knowledge that already exists within local and Indigenous food traditions.
We believe that changing food systems requires more than changing individual behavior. It requires people who can see systems, make connections, collaborate across differences, and recognize their own capacity to contribute to change.
Our goal is therefore not simply to teach people about plants. It is to create learning spaces where people can explore how food connects us to our bodies, communities, animals, ecosystems, histories, and futures, and then carry that knowledge into their own classrooms, professions, organizations, and communities.
2. What are some of the biggest wins you’ve had so far?
One of our biggest wins has been developing educational standards, learning outcomes, and competencies that meaningfully integrate animal welfare and animal advocacy into interdisciplinary food systems education.
When we began this work, we expected to adapt existing sustainability and food systems resources into Spanish for the Mexican context. Instead, our research revealed significant gaps in the educational infrastructure itself. There are far fewer resources available in Spanish than in English, and even where resources exist, there are limited frameworks for teaching food systems across disciplines and connecting them meaningfully to animal welfare, climate, health, justice, and culture.
So we found ourselves doing something bigger than translating a curriculum. We began building the learning infrastructure needed to support this kind of education, including competencies, learning outcomes, pedagogical approaches, assessments, visual resources, and culturally grounded materials.
Launching the first Plant Futures Certificate was an important milestone, but the deeper win has been creating a foundation that can continue to grow. We have brought together academics, clinicians, agroecology practitioners, educators, and animal advocacy and ethics scholars, and we are beginning to build pathways for these resources to enter other educational settings.
We have also seen strong validation from the people participating in the program. Students, professionals, and academics recognized that their existing institutions often lack opportunities to connect these subjects across disciplinary silos. That has reinforced our belief that there is a significant need for accessible, Spanish-language educational infrastructure that helps people understand how food systems connect to the wellbeing of humans, animals, and ecosystems.
For us, the biggest win is that we are no longer simply identifying this gap. We have begun building the educational infrastructure to help fill it.
3. Plants are at the heart of your work, and that opens doors to climate, health, justice, culture change, and animals all at once. How do you see those threads connecting?
We see plants as a way of connecting not only different movements and disciplines, but also past, present, future, and our own bodies.
In Mexico and across Latin America, food is deeply connected to ancestry, territory, culture, and collective memory. There is an enormous legacy of knowledge about plants, agriculture, biodiversity, nourishment, and relationships with the more-than-human world that has been passed down through generations. For us, a plant-forward future isn’t about abandoning that history or importing a new model from somewhere else. It is about recognizing that this knowledge already belongs to our communities and histories, and asking how we can carry that legacy forward in ways that respond to the realities of today.
At the same time, food is deeply embodied. We don’t simply learn about ecosystems intellectually. We eat them. What we eat becomes part of our bodies. Food gives us a tangible way to experience our relationship with soil, water, plants, animals, farmers, landscapes, and the larger ecosystems that sustain us. It reminds us that we are not separate from nature observing it from the outside. We are part of these systems.
That sense of embodiment can also create a pathway toward empathy. When we begin to understand ourselves as interconnected with other living beings and dependent on the same ecological systems, it becomes possible to ask different questions about how we relate to animals and the more-than-human world. For us, animal advocacy is not separate from food systems or environmental education. It can emerge from a deeper understanding of interdependence, embodiment, and relationship.
This is also where ancestral knowledge and contemporary innovation meet. We can look to food systems such as the milpa and chinampas not simply as historical artifacts, but as living sources of knowledge about biodiversity, reciprocity, community, and nourishment. At the same time, we can ask contemporary questions about climate change, public health, urbanization, land access, food justice, and animal welfare.
We see this as a question of ownership and agency. People should be able to see themselves not only as consumers of ideas developed elsewhere, but as inheritors of knowledge and active participants in shaping what comes next. A plant-forward future in Mexico should emerge from Mexico’s own histories, cultures, relationships to land, and knowledge systems, while remaining open to innovation and new possibilities.
So for us, being plant-forward is not simply a dietary or environmental intervention. It is a way of honoring a legacy while carrying it forward. It asks us to reconnect with ourselves, recognize ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it, and use that embodied understanding to imagine more reciprocal relationships with one another, with animals, and with the ecosystems that sustain us.
4. What are the most significant challenges you currently face in advancing your mission?
One of the most interesting challenges we have encountered is the lack of shared language around some of the concepts we are trying to introduce into Spanish-language education. This is not simply a translation problem. Some of the terms and frameworks we work with do not yet have widely agreed-upon equivalents in Spanish, and in some cases there is not yet a strong consensus around the concepts themselves. As we translate and contextualize ideas around animal advocacy, multispecies ethics, food systems, and plant-forward approaches, interesting tensions and contradictions emerge. Rather than treating these as problems to simply resolve through translation, we see them as opportunities to develop language that is meaningful within the Mexican and Latin American context.
We are also navigating a gap between broad agreement around sustainability and climate action and a deeper understanding of what systems change actually requires. Across students, professionals, and even private-sector conversations, we encounter strong interest in sustainability and climate action. The challenge is that terms like “sustainability,” “climate action,” and even “food systems” are so broad that people can agree on the language without necessarily sharing an understanding of how these issues connect or what meaningful action looks like.
This is particularly interesting in Mexico because many of the practices we are trying to reconnect people with are not new. Indigenous and grassroots communities have long developed ways of relating to land, food, biodiversity, reciprocity, and collective wellbeing that contain many of the principles now being discussed through contemporary sustainability frameworks. There can be a gap between that lived knowledge and the way sustainability is framed within academic, institutional, and business settings. We see an opportunity to translate between these worlds without flattening them, creating spaces where people can connect existing knowledge with contemporary challenges and develop a more systems-based understanding of food and sustainability.
A related challenge is working across institutional and disciplinary silos. The people we want to connect with often come from very different fields, with different vocabularies, assumptions, and ways of understanding the same problems. Building enough shared language to have productive conversations takes time, but we see this as an important part of coalition building itself.
We are also learning that student life in Mexico can look very different from the university experience we might assume when designing an online course. Many of our students balance coursework with jobs, family responsibilities, and long commutes. Students often do not live on campus or experience a campus-centered student culture. Even when we scheduled sessions outside conventional work and school hours, some students joined class while commuting or moving between responsibilities. This has challenged us to think more flexibly about participation, technology, time, and what accessibility actually means.
Finally, we are navigating the challenge of building relationships across institutions and sectors at a pace that allows trust and reciprocity to develop. We have found significant interest from academics, practitioners, and organizations, but meaningful collaboration takes time. We want these relationships to be more than transactional opportunities to distribute our curriculum. We are interested in creating reciprocal partnerships where knowledge, skills, resources, and opportunities move in both directions.
These challenges have ultimately made the work more nuanced. We are learning that advancing a plant-forward and animal-inclusive vision in Mexico is not simply about bringing existing ideas into a new context. It requires developing a shared language, creating spaces for dialogue across differences, listening to local realities, and building relationships that allow new ideas to take root organically. That process is slower, but we believe it will make the resulting movement and educational work much more culturally grounded and sustainable.
5. How has the ACE Movement Grant helped strengthen Plant Futures Initiative’s work?
The ACE Movement Grant gave us the capacity to invest in something that is difficult to fund but fundamental to movement building: educational infrastructure and the research needed to understand where that infrastructure is missing.
The grant allowed us to dedicate substantial time to research, curriculum development, localization, collaboration, piloting, and evaluation. Importantly, this research was not limited to asking, “How do we create a course?” It allowed us to investigate the broader educational landscape and understand what resources, frameworks, learning standards, competencies, and institutional pathways already exist for teaching about food systems, plant-forward approaches, climate, health, justice, and animal advocacy.
Our research is not intended to represent a complete or exhaustive mapping of the Mexican educational system. However, the patterns we encountered across our research, conversations with academics and practitioners, and curriculum development process were consistent enough to give us a much clearer understanding of where Plant Futures is situated and where significant gaps exist. In particular, we found a shortage of Spanish-language resources and very limited educational infrastructure that brings these areas together in an interdisciplinary way, especially where animal advocacy, animal welfare, and multispecies ethics intersect with food systems and sustainability education.
This changed the nature of the project. Rather than simply adapting existing English-language resources, we were able to invest in developing the Spanish-language curriculum and the underlying educational infrastructure to support it.
The grant also enabled us to begin building the social infrastructure around that curriculum by working with clinicians, academics, agroecology practitioners, educators, and animal ethics scholars, while opening conversations with Mexican universities and creating pathways for participants to connect with relevant organizations and practitioners.
The grant also strengthened Plant Futures’ own organizational capacity and understanding of how to work within the Mexican educational ecosystem. Through this process, we learned not only how to develop and deliver the curriculum, but also how faculty engage with interdisciplinary content, what institutional pathways are realistic, what accessibility barriers participants face, and where opportunities exist for future academic and movement partnerships. This knowledge will directly inform our next cohort and our broader strategy for disseminating the curriculum.
In this sense, the grant has also created a stronger foundation for future growth. We are no longer approaching expansion with an untested concept. We now have a developed and piloted curriculum, participant feedback, a network of collaborators, evidence of demand, and a clearer understanding of the institutional landscape. The next phase can therefore focus more heavily on dissemination, institutional partnerships, and reaching additional learners.
We see ACE’s support as uniquely foundational. It mobilized resources at a stage when the most important work was not simply producing an educational program, but understanding the landscape, identifying gaps, building the missing infrastructure, and testing how that infrastructure could begin to function within existing educational and movement ecosystems.
Some of the value of that investment will not be immediately visible in short-term metrics. The curriculum, learning frameworks, research, relationships, and institutional knowledge developed through the grant can continue to be adapted and expanded through future cohorts, university collaborations, and other educational settings.
We are especially grateful that ACE was willing to support this foundational stage. The grant gave us the time and capacity to understand the problem more deeply and build educational and social infrastructure that we believe can support plant-forward, animal-centered, and climate education in Mexico and Latin America for the long term.
6. If you had to share a final message with the ACE audience, what would it be?
We would invite people to think about education as the long game of animal advocacy, climate action, and movement building.
When we think about the infrastructure our movements need, we often think about organizations, campaigns, policies, or funding. But we also need to think about the people who will carry this work forward. That means creating spaces for intergenerational dialogue, knowledge sharing, and coalition building, where people can learn from those who have been doing this work for decades while also bringing their own perspectives, skills, and ideas into the movement.
We also believe education is more than a place where we acquire knowledge. Education is a space where we practice being contributing members of society. It is where we learn how to ask questions, listen to perspectives different from our own, work collectively, imagine alternatives, and understand our own capacity to participate in creating change.
We want those spaces to nurture ownership, curiosity, courage, compassion, and social justice. Ownership means helping people recognize that they have a stake in shaping the future and that their knowledge and experiences matter. Curiosity gives us the willingness to question what we have inherited and imagine what could be different. Courage allows us to act on those possibilities. Compassion asks us to remain attentive to the experiences and wellbeing of others, including the animals and ecosystems with whom we share the world. And social justice asks us to consider who benefits from the systems we build and whose voices and knowledge have historically been left out.
We also want people to recognize that they do not need a particular professional title to contribute to building a more ethical and liberated society. A teacher, chef, artist, researcher, health professional, farmer, communicator, organizer, student, or community member can all bring something valuable. Our skills, relationships, creativity, and lived experiences are forms of movement capacity.
Education gives us a place to develop that capacity and connect it to something larger. It allows knowledge to move between generations, creates relationships across disciplines and movements, and helps people understand how their individual work connects to larger systems.
The impact of education can be difficult to quantify in the short term. A conversation in a classroom today may shape someone’s career, research, teaching, organizing, or community work years from now. A student who encounters animal advocacy or climate action through a food systems course may eventually become the person teaching the next generation, influencing policy, changing an institution, building a new organization, or transforming their own community.
That is why we see education as the long game of animal advocacy and climate action.
If we want to build movements that last, we need to invest not only in the problems we are trying to solve today, but in the people who will continue solving them tomorrow. We need to build the social and educational infrastructure that allows knowledge, relationships, skills, compassion, and possibilities to move from one generation to the next.
For us, Plant Futures is one contribution to that longer-term infrastructure. We want to create spaces where people can reconnect with knowledge they already carry, develop the courage and curiosity to imagine differently, recognize their own capacity to contribute, cultivate compassion for one another and the more-than-human world, build relationships across movements, and practice creating futures that are more ethical, reciprocal, just, and liberated.
Disclaimer/Note:The responses in this spotlight were provided by Plant Futures Initiative and reflect the organization’s own account of their work.
ACE is dedicated to creating a world where all animals can thrive, regardless of their species. We take the guesswork out of supporting animal advocacy by directing funds toward the most impactful charities and programs, based on evidence and research.
Table of Contents
- 1. Could you introduce the Plant Futures Initiative and the core problem your work is trying to solve?
- 2. What are some of the biggest wins you’ve had so far?
- 3. Plants are at the heart of your work, and that opens doors to climate, health, justice, culture change, and animals all at once. How do you see those threads connecting?
