Here at LittlePod, we have long supported Dr Vik Mohan and his important work providing crucial healthcare services in Madagascar. Having helped build Blue Ventures, a thriving marine conservation organisation that supports coastal communities across the Indian Ocean, Vik has now teamed up with Planet Indonesia and is relishing the chance to put his experience and skills to good use. Keen to continue to donate 10% of all our online sales to support his efforts, we felt the time had come for a catch-up with Vik. These are his words:

I look back on the work I did at Blue Ventures with great pride. In the beginning, I started offering health services to one community in one village. By the time I left Blue Ventures, the model I had helped to pioneer was serving nearly one million people across six countries. During the time I spent at Blue Ventures, we built a movement on the premise of acting holistically in support of communities and biodiversity. Things at Blue Ventures developed at a dizzying rate!

I learnt an awful lot during 20 years at Blue Ventures. I’m keen to help Planet Indonesia benefit from all those lessons – the good and the bad, the successes and the mistakes. When a colleague first said to me that we should go from serving 2,000 to 10,000 people, the colour drained from my face. I didn’t have a clue about how we might do that. But by the end, we were reaching nearly a million people. Rapid growth brings exciting opportunities for creating impact. But it also brings challenges. I want to help Planet Indonesia to navigate these.

LittlePod’s funding and support is so important. It means a lot that LittlePod recognises and values what we are doing.

Dr Vik Mohan

Planet Indonesia and LittlePod have a lot in common. There is alignment between the two, with shared values and a vision that puts communities first and sees the interconnectedness of people and planet. I’m proud to be considered a member of the LittlePod team and am so excited to be joining Planet Indonesia and taking LittlePod’s continued support with me. I’m keen to share all that I’ve learnt during the last 20 years. With this funding, LittlePod is helping me to do that. I’m very grateful.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Madagascar. It’s magical and unique. But it faces so many challenges. So many people think of Madagascar as an unspoilt paradise, all lemurs and chameleons. Without doubt the biodiversity is magnificent and of huge importance, given that so much of it isn’t found anywhere else. But it’s also one of the world’s poorest countries, with some of the world’s weakest healthcare infrastructure. It is also very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The communities I worked alongside aren’t celebrating the country’s amazing biodiversity. They’re working hard to survive. These are some of the poorest, most underserved people you’ll see anywhere on Earth. I’ve experienced a really strong sense of community in my time in Madagascar, and have made some great friendships with people I’ve worked alongside for two decades. But I also have seen what communities are up against, with declining natural resources and increasingly-frequent extreme weather events.

I first visited Madagascar’s vanilla-growing region 10 or 12 years ago. I have collaborated with an organisation that supports vanilla farmers to live sustainably and to protect some of Madagascar’s most important landscapes. What I learnt on that visit was that if you engage communities and work to address their priority needs, you build trust and support for your own mission. If communities don’t buy into conservation, environmental degradation risks going unchecked. If communities are able to get behind the conservation mission, and are able to see how it will benefit them, they become the champions of biodiversity protection. It’s important to create the enabling conditions for them to be able to live sustainably.

Vanilla’s value can distort local markets and farming practices too. We have to consider the value chain, fair prices for farmers and the impact that vanilla production can have on a wider ecosystem. Vanilla farming can be so lucrative that in some situations people stop growing anything else. I’ve been to markets in the most fertile parts of Madagascar and you can’t buy food because all that’s grown locally is vanilla.

We need to think and act holistically. To meet community needs and address the threats facing ecosystems. We can’t hope to solve the complex, multidimensional problems the world faces otherwise. This holistic, system level approach to biodiversity conservation was pretty unusual when we first started applying it at Blue Ventures. Over time, I could see that Planet Indonesia embodied the same values and was taking a similar approach to the one that I had championed at Blue Ventures. I travelled to Indonesia to support them to replicate the approach that I pioneered at Blue Ventures. The team have taken it up and run with it. It’s something that I’m very excited about.

LittlePod’s funding and support has been, and will continue to be, so important. Unrestricted funding, that is not attached to a particular activity or goal, is precious. To have a regular source of unrestricted funding means we can do the things that we really want to do, irrespective of whether it’s a priority for a funder. That was the case at Blue Ventures and it will continue to be the case at Planet Indonesia. In addition, it has felt like an endorsement of what we do. This is almost more important than the money! It means a lot that LittlePod recognises and values what we are doing.

My friendship with Janet and with LittlePod is important to me. Janet was one of the first supporters of Blue Ventures’ holistic approach to conservation, back in the day when we didn’t have big grants and I was spending my own money to run the healthcare programme in Madagascar. Ever since then I’ve had a real fondness for LittlePod. There has been a really clear alignment of values, both with Blue Ventures and now with Planet Indonesia. I’m so thankful for all the support that LittlePod has offered and provided over the years.

From the team here at LittlePod, we send vanilla hugs and our thanks to Vik for all his important efforts and endeavours. We are proud to support you and Planet Indonesia. Keep up the good work!