Mahlette Betre reflects on her time at Salmon Gold and the possibilities as the program scales up. She discusses her new role as a board member of impact@RESOLVE and how she will continue to support Salmon Gold from this role.
Mahlette Betre Reflects on Salmon GoldIn light of Salmon Gold’s partner, Dean Race’s, award winning restoration, Mahlette discusses her perspective on the Salmon Gold program.It has been an honor to work with Dean Race on Salmon Gold. Dean was the very first placer mining partner of Salmon Gold. With his sons, Chris and Dakota, they both re-mined historic placer sites and restored a part of Jack Wade Creek, a tributary of the Fortymile River in Alaska. While at RESOLVE, I was able to work closely with Dean to demonstrate how his work aligned with sustainable sourcing requirements, I supported fundraising to enable restoration efforts and collaborated with Dean, Tiffany & Co., Apple and the refiner PAMP, to ensure the re-mined gold entered into their supply chains.From my own experience working on Salmon Gold, I’ve seen what is possible when placer miners, conservation leaders, Native Corporations, jewelers and tech companies, agencies like the US BLM and Yukon Geological Survey work together to tackle a problem.Programs like Salmon Gold catalyze change, bring parties together, and find new solutions to long-standing challenges.I have no doubt that as Salmon Gold grows it will rally more partners to participate. My particular interest now is to bring impact investors and impact finance to the program. As an incoming board member with impact@RESOLVE, I’m excited for all the possibilities of the Salmon Gold program.With Salmon Gold in the supply-chains of Apple and Tiffany & Co., and our dedicated partners already winning awards for their restoration efforts, we now have a product to take to investors and scale.The next milestone will be to secure agreement on a set of policies, incentives, and tools that will help quantify the stream restoration Dean and others are undertaking, and qualify it for compensatory mitigation with government leaders. We are working with donors to help us put these in place, to ensure that our mining and restoration partners have the resources they need to scale restoration across this vast region.I look forward to working closely with the Salmon Gold team, leveraging the success of the initial phase of work, to expand and achieve even greater impact.Mahlette BetreBoard Member, impact@RESOLVE, and Environmental and Social Performance Lead, The Intrinsic Value ExchangeOctober 21, 2019
At RESOLVE, we’re here to tackle the toughest global challenges. The ones nobody else wants to touch. Where people are in conflict and planet problems are stuck. We’re here to unstick them. It’s not easy. It takes grit and ingenuity. And finding and working with the right partners. But we’re not called RESOLVE for nothing.
