This is a wall from the Spice Harbor property. A lot of the conservation story can be told in the design. The way they built this property is an example of historical/cultural conservation. The restaurant building was a “go down”, or waterfront warehouse, that used to store spices. They didn’t knock down the old building, they actually just built around it and framed pieces of the old wall to display it as art. This design concept has been passed on by word of mouth-taught to the workers here, but it hasn’t been documented yet.
I felt that this blog could better serve its purpose if the conservation story was told in one place. The stated purpose of the RAXA Collective site is to provide a space for people to learn about entrepreneurial conversation. It seems to me that highlighting the details of the property is less meaningful without context of the concept and history behind them.
The summarized version as stated in the RAXA Collective “About section” is to have a business whose profits are invested in conservation of natural and cultural patrimony. However, as I’ve been learning, the way this model manifests itself depends on the situation. Each story is pretty radically different than the next. So, we have a very general description (About section) and very specific descriptions (every day posts), but we don’t have the overall narrative of each property to show how “it depends” shows up differently in the field of entrepreneurial conservation.
I resonate with the initially stated goal in the About section about having this site provide a space for university students to learn about alternatives to mainstream occupations and career paths. As a university student myself, that is really what I am here as an intern to learn. I have been able to offer my skills and passions for organic agriculture and gain more practice in that field as an intern here. However, that is a skill I have picked up along my studies, which are driven by the bigger goals of conservation and environmental business models.
Organikos 