An Obituary to the Avarna Group

It is with bittersweet emotions that we want to let you know that we are finally formally shutting down the Avarna Group. We’ve had a great run, and we thank you all for trusting us to support you over the last decade. Though The Avarna Group is ending, the relationships we’ve built and the vision we’ve shared continue to shape our paths.

I (aparna) am in a great place with Together Rising as an Environmental Community, supporting conservation groups, Tribal Nations, and First Nations across Western Turtle Island with a team of stellar individuals. I just turned 50 and have been celebrating my semi-centennial year with my family on monthly adventures mountain biking in Tucson, canyoneering in southern Utah, climbing in Bishop, California, road tripping over 5,500 miles across Oregon, Washington, BC, the Yukon, and Alaska, and walking the Highlands above Loch Ness in Scotland. 

I (Cianna) am so grateful for the partnership, growth and joy that being a part of the Avarna Group has brought me over the last 3 years. I will continue to independently provide consulting support to those seeking to create equitable strategy, systems and programs, and I am overjoyed to begin a new role as the Community and Partnerships Manager at Black Women in Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Science. 

Given these liminal times, we feel incredibly fortunate to continue doing work that is meaningful, values-aligned, and rooted in community. You can reach both of us on LinkedIn at Cianna and aparna. 

To celebrate the Avarna Group’s ten-year life, it felt fitting to write an obituary. But this was challenging. We spent a decade trying not to center ourselves, so we rarely stopped to acknowledge what we’d built. So who could brag for us? Enter AI. 

We don’t want to be forgotten, so I (aparna) shared a draft obituary and a number of the Avarna Group’s accomplishments with AI and asked it to humblebrag for us. So here’s an obituary, written by aparna, and zhuzhed up by AI. 

The Avarna Group
October 1, 2015 to August 6, 2026

The Avarna Group peacefully transitioned today after a decade of asking difficult questions, reading obscure academic papers for fun, and convincing conservation organizations that justice belongs at the center (and not the margins) of their work. 

They passed peacefully. The cause of death was a combination of political headwinds (a/k/a the DEI backlash), founder evolution, and the simple truth that sometimes an organization completes the work they were meant to do. They always joked that their goal was to work themselves out of business. Little did they know they were foretelling their own ultimate demise (destiny?)

The Avarna Group are survived by co-founders aparna rajagopal and Ava Holliday, partner Cianna Carrillo-Walker Flom, and a community of roughly 10,000 newsletter subscribers. They leave behind few possessions beyond some flip charts, markers, a gorgeous website that may or may not survive the year, and 36 Gigabytes of Google Drive files encapsulating their decade of thinking.  

The Avarna Group’s impact is difficult to reduce to numbers, though this wasn’t for lack of trying to figure out how to “metricize” their work. The Avarna Group’s partner Cianna often describes this as the “umami” of the work—that quality you know is there even if you can’t isolate it into a single ingredient. 

But here are just a few stories to illustrate the Avarna Group’s impact:

During their ten-year life, Avarna partnered with more than 1,000 organizations and institutions across the environmental, outdoor, conservation, and philanthropic sectors (how’s that for a number?).

Among their proudest accomplishments:

• Co-founding and financing PGM ONE, a national convening for BIPOC folks working in environmental fields to share, learn, collaborate, and heal together.
• Authoring the first edition of The Wilderness Society’s Public Lands Curriculum, which helped broaden the stories we tell about public lands and whose histories belong there.
• Publishing a free implementation toolkit following President Obama’s memorandum on diversity and inclusion in public lands—a resource that, according to several little birdies, eventually found its way into the Biden transition team’s work.
• Remaining loyal to equity and justice in the face of pushback from people in power, which in at least one case helped catalyze the unionization of employees in an organization plagued by toxic leadership.

Supporting organizations through one of the most politically turbulent periods for DEI work by offering free webinars, articles, and practical guidance when many leaders felt isolated and unsure how to move forward.

The Avarna Group were never perfect. They occasionally got things wrong. Sometimes they changed their own mind. Sometimes they learned publicly. But they never wavered from their integrity. Unlike many organizations of their generation, the Avarna Group never became much of a social media influencer, partially because they weren’t savvy at social media, but mostly because their core value of humility kept them from sharing their accomplishments publicly (though they did maintain a Twitter account for a bit almost exclusively to follow people they admired). They called themselves “experienced,” and not “experts” because they were always learning and evolving. Curiosity was always more important than certainty. And equity and justice were always more important than coddling particular individuals. Which occasionally meant the Avarna Group said things that leaders weren’t thrilled to hear, something they never regretted.

In lieu of flowers, we ask that you remain curious(er). Ask harder questions. Build wider tables. Tell fuller histories. And keep choosing equity and justice even when it becomes inconvenient.