William Ingram

Background

About William Ingram

I am a mathematician who learned to be a storyteller. As a teenager, I could not see how industrial growth fit into a finite planet. Mathematics’ certainties offered escape into abstraction, but I cared too much, and my social conscience asserted itself. After university I volunteered for two years with a community development NGO, grant writing in their Tokyo office, and spent three more years in Japan co-managing an English-language environmental magazine. In 1993 I moved to Bali and led cultural tours to remote eastern Indonesia. In 1997, when the Asian Financial Crisis destroyed the livelihoods of those we visited, my wife and I developed Threads of Life: sell traditional textiles; focus on natural dyes where margins are better; value add with stories of cultural integrity; work directly with makers to shorten value chains and maximise incomes. We have since grown this into a USD business with 30 staff that works with over weavers on 12 islands. I manage finance, research and development. To support transmission of natural dye knowledge between generations within indigenous communities, and to address the declining availability of forest-sourced dye plants, we established the Bebali Foundation in 2002. I have been director ever since, building a USD organisation and managing programs funded by donors as diverse as the World Bank and the Ford Foundation. My work led to many collaborations. From 2013-22 I worked on smallholder market strategies for non-timber forest products in a large multi-stakeholder applied research project and learned to realise a complex vision in practical work plans, budgets, and reporting. Keeping Threads of Life going through two years of Covid has been the biggest challenge of my career. That my priority was keeping all our staff at least part-employed over conserving capital showed me social and economic justice really are my core values. Covid has also facilitated succession planning so that the business and foundation become fully Indonesian organisations while each is lean and relatively simple. I am at my best addressing complex issues: I have the mathematician’s talent for filtering noise and finding underlying patterns, and the storyteller’s intuition for a narrative pathway through those patterns. SPECIALITIES • Social enterprise development • Organisational resilience • NTFP supply chains and resource management • Business-Indigenous producer collaborations • Participatory research CONTACT william@threadsoflife.com