Working Groups

Wild Plants Working Group

Meets monthly, all members are actively engaged in research with wild harvesters

This working group is conducting research on 10-14 wild harvested species from around the world in order to develop a robust framework for understanding and supporting sustainable wild harvesting practices and communities. By centering the experiences of wild collectors, this working group aims to bridge critical knowledge gaps in the herbal products industry and develop actionable solutions to preserve both ecological systems and traditional harvesting communities.

Primary objectives:

To document the diverse challenges faced in ethically sourcing wild medicinal plants across different cultural and ecological contexts.
To develop a transferable framework that the herbal products industry can adapt and apply across varied socio-economic settings.
To create strategic interventions to address identified challenges, with a focus on:
- Amplifying wild collectors’ narratives through multimedia storytelling.
- Facilitating direct engagement between wild harvesters and industry stakeholders.
- Presenting research findings at key industry conferences and events and in shorter educational brochures and documents geared at those in procurement and customers.

Mapping Sourcing Risks

Meets monthly, all members actively involved in conducting research on risk assessments for species identified by the group

Our main goal is to gain a better understanding of the vulnerabilities for herb growers, wild harvesters, producers, and brokers by species and by region. Together we will map these risks by both species (bottom up/grassroots) and, as relevant by region (more top down/data driven information). We will share this information so members have more information to guide their sourcing decisions.

Our primary objectives include:

Identify shared benchmarks and metrics that companies (suppliers and brands) hope to achieve.
Share best practices from case studies where companies are sourcing an ingredient well as well as ones that have challenges to develop a guideline of shared best practices.
Shine the light on these best practices, perhaps by region/botanicals.
Identify inset projects with shared suppliers or in shared sourcing regions to help address and potentially reduce the risks for suppliers in those regions and for companies sourcing botanicals from that region.

Quality and Compliance

Larger working group meets every 6 weeks. Smaller focus group meets monthly to develop and implement research.

The goals of this Working Group are to create a space where stakeholders can share their perspectives on quality control standards, the importance of these standards, the challenges in implementing them, etc. And we are developing research to demonstrate the relationship between investing in traceable, transparent sourcing practices and higher quality plants with fewer rejections.

Storytelling and Marketing

The goal of this working group is to collaborate to better tell and share the stories of the work we are doing together. This is a new group led by David Gordon, founder of evanhealy. Meets monthly

Producers

Meets monthly, for primary producers only.

The goals of this working group are to:

Create a forum where producers and primary processors from around the world working with wild harvested and cultivated material can exchange ideas, resources, and best practices.
Produce guidance documents on best practices to share with other primary processors.
Produce guidance documents on recommendations for ways buyers and customers further up the supply chain can best support primary processing companies and producers.

Outcomes:

To build connections through sharing experiences, challenges, etc.
To share skills/methods/information.
To begin developing a network of producers working in or toward agroforestry models for growing medicinal plants (and possibly expanding to wild harvested plants) both as a source of botanicals for companies looking for regeneratively farmed material and also to bring the voice of producers to the industry so companies hear directly from them, not only through suppliers.

This group meets monthly to discuss a specific topic to be decided upon and shared in advance of the meeting.