Building the Reef: What Helps a Future Grow?
What does it look like to steward a future into being?
Across seven founder stories, we encounter Ventures reshaping how we care, build, eat, work, and live in relationship with the natural world.
Their work reaches far beyond the boundaries of their businesses, creating new possibilities for communities and wider systems, strengthened along the way by relationships, knowledge, capital, and collective care.
A fisher walks the dock with the confidence of a buyer, no longer feeling lesser. A family finds relief; their aging parent finally has the home care she deserves. A skier finds warmth in the ancestral knowledge that natural fur is best at warding off the cold.
Over the past few months, we’ve been in conversation with several Coralus founders. Time and time again, we see the same current flowing through their stories. They aren’t just building a business; they’re building the conditions for new futures to grow and thrive.
A coral reef is never built just by one sea creature or even one species. Coral polyps lay down the reef’s foundation, and then a wider community of fish, invertebrates, and microbes work interdependently to grow and sustain everything the reef needs to thrive.
Food. Energy. Materials. Shelter. Care. Spirit.
As Chloé Dubois discovered during a recent deep dive, it’s the shared living infrastructure that enables life to flourish not just within the reef, but throughout the larger ocean ecosystem. (While coral reefs only make up 1% of the ocean’s floor, about a quarter of all marine species rely on reefs at some point during their life.)
The reef-frame became crystal clear.
A coral reef is interconnected and generative. Its structures become the substrate something else can build on. Every organism in the reef helps grow, strengthen, and sustain the whole ecosystem. There is no isolation. There is no division. There is only co-creation.
Likewise, Coralus flows capital to futures that invite possibilities for the wider system. Futures that invite others to build upon and beyond what’s already been created.
A modular housing company providing affordable homes while also recirculating sustainable building materials and creating spaces for Black chefs to prepare food for their community.
An organization caring for those society has given up on, while providing pathways to employment so they can secure housing and food.
A foundation transforming ocean garbage into plastic pellets and protecting sensitive water habitats, while anchoring its work in reconnecting humans with the natural world.
Every future touches on multiple reef functions, but one function stands apart as the connective tissue running through all seven organizations: care. Care that’s woven through relationships, trust, connection, empathy, and embracing wholeness.
Just as care threaded its way through every founder story, so did the ‘us’ in Coralus. At every step, the community flowed skills, wisdom, time, money, and other resources toward these shared futures.
As you with-ness these shared futures surfacing, feel into what lights you up. And consider what might be yours to help grow and sustain.
Let each link in this piece lead you to a future that’s already surfacing.
Explore the futures taking shape:
Seven stories of founders building, tending, and stewarding futures that others can grow alongside.
What if growth didn’t mean getting bigger at any cost? Sonia Strobel has spent eighteen years building a different kind of seafood system, one where independent fishing families have more power, eaters know who catches their food, and relationships matter as much as transactions.
Home care was built around institutions. Chenny Xia is helping turn that system upside down, putting people, relationships, and individual choice at the centre while finding the openings where lasting structural change can take root.
What began with ecological grief has grown into a movement transforming ocean plastic into possibility. Chloé Dubois is building new systems for plastic circularity while inviting communities to reconnect with the natural world, and their power to change it.
What if the places we build could create belonging, opportunity, and community wealth at the same time? Wanona Satcher is drawing on ancestral wisdom, perseverance, and a different vision of growth to build neighbourhoods where people can live, work, learn, create, and thrive.
What changes when we stop seeing people through their wounds and start seeing everything they carry? Sarah Gun is creating pathways to meaningful work for women experiencing social marginalization, grounded in dignity, belonging, and care for the whole person.
Innovation doesn’t always mean inventing something new. Through Aurora Heat, Brenda Dragon is bringing generations of Indigenous knowledge forward, reconnecting people with natural materials, the Land, and ways of living rooted in care and reciprocity.
What began as an experiment in flowing capital differently became something much bigger: a community learning to redistribute power, stay in relationship with uncertainty, and create the conditions for different futures to emerge. Vicki Saunders reflects on twelve years of experimentation and what Coralus was really building all along.
THE CORALUS EDITORIAL FIELD
Shannon Courtney, Danielle Cadhit, Vicki Saunders and others from the Coralus Field
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