Melissa Hunter Gurney is an educator, conservationist, founder & writer.
Her work is advocacy based and explores the connection between nature, art and community. She is co-founder of the Lo—TEK Institute, an agent for nature based education and advocacy that houses the Living Earth Curriculum & Digital Database as well as Black Land Ownership, a grassroots organization put in place to combat systemic oppression around property ownership in the Americas. Both entities work to engage urban youth in nature based initiatives and are working together on an ancestral artist residency in New York State.
With twenty years of pedagogy and leadership in the public, international, and private sector, Melissa also engages in extensive educational consulting with secondary schools as well as college advising for students and families.
Her written work tends to explore the multi-faceted experiences of Pan-American women and artists and can be found in various publications both nationally and internationally.
THE LO—TEK INSTITUTE
The Lo—TEK Institute is an organization founded by Julia Watson & Melissa Hunter Gurney. The institute is a community of educators, knowledge keepers, architects, designers, founders, historians, philosophers and environmental advocates who actively support the Lo—TEK Living Earth Curriculum & Digital Database. The institute works to empower communities whose philosophies have been violently dismissed across educational and environmental spheres and to engage in projects across the globe that enhance nature based technologies and environmental literacy.
BLACK LAND OWNERSHIP
A grassroots organization founded by Melissa Hunter Gurney and Christopher Carr to combat the historical, systemic and institutionalized marginalization experienced by people of African descent when it comes to land ownership. Black Land Ownership works to place lands across the country in conservation, build educational spaces that empower rural land ownership within the Black community as well as other marginalized groups and empower research around the history and present circumstance of land ownership and stewardship in the United States.