A HUMI Theory-of-Change

The Healthy Urban Microbiome Initiative (HUMI) is a science-led endeavour to help decision-makers and the public apply the rapidly growing knowledge of environmental microbiomes in ways that might improve the health of communities. Urban communities in particular, but any setting in which healthy microbial exposures are lacking.

If you are interested so far, you might also be interested to know that this directly related to the amount of biodiversity (aka ‘green space’) that you are exposed to every day. Have a look at the HUMI website to read more about this emerging understanding of our environments, and to understand why the UN Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity formed a partnership with HUMI in 2018.

We began life as an Australian research initiative at the University of Adelaide in 2015. We are now a growing collection of researchers, public health practitioners, and teachers located around the world. We set out with the idea that we wanted to go beyond our day jobs and to contribute to our growing knowledge about microbiomes towards making the world a better place. Importantly, improving population health, and particularly enhancing the resilience of communities in the face of global heating and biodiversity loss.

One of the key ideas we developed with the UNCBD was the HUMI 2020 Challenge. 2020. That worked out well didn’t it. It was going to be a big year for us, but the pandemic brought a significant constriction of funding for people trying to save the world. Go figure. However, we didn’t roll-over, no, we Zoomed. So many Zoom meetings. We met a couple interesting people, they had some interesting ideas that we looked at, but ultimately, the idea that seemed to resonate with most of us, was HUMI Suva.

Theory-of-Change

So we’ve worked up a first attempt at our very own theory-of-change. A Visual mapping of how we think we can make a difference. It is early days for us and our Fijian school partner — the Multiple Intelligence School in Suva, but together we’re hoping to create a programme we can share with schools around the world to help students learn while they work on making our Planet a healthier more sustainable world.