Building the New Within the Old: Indigenous Voices and Corporate Sustainability at the Grand Canyon
Part of Upstream’s Just Transition Series
When Upstream kicked off our reuse project at the Grand Canyon National Park in late 2024, we were excited by the ambition and complexity of the project. We recognized that an essential first step would be a thorough stakeholder analysis in order to gather baseline data about the single-use system currently in place, to hear concerns and perspectives on our plans, and to ensure the new systems improve operations, quality of life, and the environment.
With 17 foodservice locations around the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, and 5M+ visitors passing through annually, those interacting with and impacted by the foodservice operations in this area are broad-ranging—from concessions operations managers and staff, to National Park Service rangers, to the gateway community, and to the Indigenous tribes that have called the Grand Canyon home for thousands of years before it was established as a national park.
The Grand Canyon Reuse Project is not a pilot: it is a full-on transition from a single-use to a reuse system in the operations of two major foodservice companies. Given the move from an extractive to a regenerative economy that this project represents, it offers us both an opportunity and a challenge to actualize the principles of a Just Transition.
A Complex Relationship
Keen to bring Indigenous stakeholders to the table early, we developed a relationship with the organization Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group that advocates for the well-being of the 11 tribes of Indigenous peoples in the Grand Canyon region. In 2019, the Grand Canyon National Park’s Centennial, the tribes were asked to contribute ideas on how to celebrate this milestone—but to them, the Centennial was not something to celebrate. They had been removed from the land and relegated to a reservation; hiring and work culture practices at the Park have been problematic; and the tribes are restricted in the kinds of engagement they can have at the Park.
An Indigenous group called the Intertribal Centennial Conversation Group (ICCG) was formed from those conversations and is now serving as an advisor to the Park, with a goal of making the next 100 years better. The ICCG includes Indigenous employees of the Grand Canyon National Park, and their goal is to place Indigenous voices of Grand Canyon’s associated tribes at the forefront of education, stewardship, and economic opportunities.
Lesson One: Navigating Grassroots Concepts Within Corporate Changemaking
Jack Pongyesva, a waste prevention entrepreneur who grew up on the Hopi reservation in nearby Oak Creek Canyon, manages the ICCG. Since one of the intentions of the organization is to increase Indigenous presence within the Grand Canyon National Park and throughout the region, we engaged Jack to explore how the reuse project could advance this interest.
We were starting to make plans for our first design sprints when we met with Jack, which seemed the ideal time to put into practice the principle of bringing all stakeholders to the table from the start, putting the most impacted first. We shared information about the project with Jack, which he passed along at a community meeting, extending the invitation for interested members to join the design sprint. Ultimately, no one from ICCG or the broader Indigenous community signed up to attend the sprints, despite interest in the project. Before we had the opportunity to probe into why this was, we learned they would not have been allowed to attend anyway. Upstream needed to sign strict NDAs with each of the foodservice partners. To work with them, neither information about operations nor even employee identities could be shared beyond the circle of those directly implementing the project.
And here we learned our first lesson: The Grand Canyon reuse project, while modeling a shift to something regenerative and sustainable that allows for better stewardship of the land, is not grassroots or community-led. As the justice and ecology focused nonprofit The Movement Generation puts it, a just transition works to “Build the New as a way to Stop the Bad,” and that building of the New originates from communities impacted by the Bad. In this case, though, Upstream is working within a larger, established corporate structure to transition their pre-existing ways to something better, rather than starting from scratch. Corporate structure is traditionally siloed by design, and despite the Park’s good-faith attempts to bridge the gap via the ICCG, our experience around the design sprints highlights an ingrained divide.
It is important to acknowledge that what is enabling this project is the willingness and sincere engagement of the two global, corporate concessionaires who run the 17 dining sites. The success and impact of this project hinges on Upstream’s role as change managers to help educate and influence corporate leadership in implementing best practices for a reuse system. At the same time, we are learning the complexities of working with corporate partners, which will better prepare us to navigate the relationships between frontline communities and future partners as we continue to do this work across other parks and large-volume venues.
Lesson Two: Economic Opportunities Will Take Creative Thinking
Bringing stakeholders to the table is one way to help ensure the Grand Canyon Reuse Project follows the principles of a just transition, but we saw another opportunity in the project’s capacity to create clean, safe, local jobs. A coal-powered power plant recently closed in one of the surrounding reservations, which was a significant blow to the local Indigenous peoples because so many livelihoods were tied to those jobs. Workforce development is a big challenge for the tribes, and Upstream wanted to explore together with them the ways in which reuse could support the community.
Our first design sprint revealed that we would need to build a new wash hub to create enough capacity for dishwashing. We hoped that this wash hub could be located on tribal land and owned by the community. However, in our second design sprint, we learned of a prohibitive obstacle: reservation land is sited far from the South Rim, and the one road in and out is closed during inclement weather. Needless to say, for the reuse system to work, the reusable foodware needs to circulate efficiently and seamlessly between the dining sites and the wash hub.
It is possible that the new jobs created by the reuse system will offer at least a few opportunities for tribal communities, as the remote location of the Park makes hiring locally more cost effective for the concessionaires.
More Lessons, More Opportunities to Come
The Grand Canyon Reuse Project still has many steps to go until implementation, and we are hopeful that there will be more opportunities for involvement and ownership by the Tribal communities. One area of continued exploration lies in Upstream’s engagement with Jessica Stago, manager of Change Labs, a program of Grand Canyon Trust that works directly with Indigenous entrepreneurs to support them in starting and growing their businesses. The goals of Change Labs include a just transition from unsustainable jobs to work which reduces extraction and increases sustainability.
Another opportunity arose when we learned a local Indigenous agricultural cooperative may be interested in being part of the supply chain to take pre-and post-consumer food scraps from the Park to supplement their compost. This would both amend the soil for crops as well as suppress the soil erosion endemic to Northern Arizona. And third, Upstream has also engaged with the Grand Canyon InterTribal Working Group to talk about how the practice of reuse could be woven into the story of conservation of this sacred national treasure.
The reuse project at the Grand Canyon National Park is projected to eliminate 50 million single-use units, 190 tons of trash, and 810 tons of carbon emissions over the 10 years after its implementation—not to mention the ongoing impact of an 84% reduction in job toxicity and about 5 million visitors annually experiencing reuse first hand. While we continue to navigate how to implement just transition principles in this real-world transition to reuse—and to continually strive to do better—we do know that at the very least, this project will mitigate environmental harms and better respect the native lands Tribal communities have called home for millennia.
