Southern Blue Ridge Fire Learning Network

Martha “Pati” Ruiz Corzo is a recognized leader for building a bottom-up civil conservation movement in central Mexico. Located in the Sierra Gorda mountains, Pati and her husband began organizing concerned citizens for a regional rescue program based on environmental education, economic development, forestry management, and community development specifically directed to women who are the heads of household in the rural extreme poverty communities due to high rates of migration of working age men to the USA.

Through Pati´s leadership, Sierra Gorda became the first natural protected area in the country to be designated in response to a bottom-up consensus. Then-president Ernesto Zedillo designated her the federal director of the new Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve in order to guarantee the involvement of the local communities which number over 600 with a population of 100,000 in a surface area of 1 million acres.

As a social entrepreneur recognized by the Ashoka: Innovators for the Public since ´96, the Schwab foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and the World Economic Forum since 2001, and the Rolex Prize for Enterprise in 2002, and on-going accompaniment of this initiative in the region since 1987, Pati is the moral leader of a widespread grassroots movement for almost 20 years, defending the integrity of this mega-diverse region and actively implementing alternatives for social and economic development towards regional sustainable development.