María José Iturralde, better known as Chochi, is the Executive Director of Fundación Pachaysana, an Ecuadorian non-profit that partners with Indigenous communities to restore territories and re-story identities. Chochi specializes in fostering connections and designing innovative systems to circumvent the oppressive and extractivist structures responsible for deforestation, biodiversity loss, and the erosion of indigenous culture, language, and cosmovision. She is the founder of Humans for Abundance, a program that carries out socio-environmental restoration with rural communities in the Amazon and Andes of Ecuador. And, in collaboration with the women of an Indigenous community in the Amazon, she co-created the Forest School (la Escuela del Bosque), which blends ancestral knowledge and practices with essential Western skills such as mathematics, English, and Spanish. Her impactful work has been featured by BBC News, BBC StoryWorks, and other international media outlets.
