Ten Years of Planet Indonesia: 7 Reflections and Lessons Learned
By Adam Miller and Novia Sagita
10th year of Planet Indonesia.
As we sit and reflect, it feels almost surreal to think that it has been ten years since we founded Planet Indonesia. A decade ago, we began with a simple but profound question: How could we put communities back in the lead, giving them control over their social and ecological futures?
To be honest, when we started the organization, we didn’t exactly know “the what” of what we wanted to do—if anything, we had more clarity about what we didn’t want to do. Conservation and climate solutions, as we saw it, were excluding rather than including frontline communities. They were dirty words that caused communities to put up barriers and prepare to fight rather than engage in a solution. Environmental and development efforts alike were falling short, leaving communities without the ownership, autonomy, and self-reliance they deserved.
So, we began with a small, scrappy team and a big vision—one that required sacrifices, including starting the organization in debt. We still remember using personal credit cards to pay the registration fees for both our U.S. and Indonesian NGOs! On Adam’s first trip home to visit his family, he planned to do some fundraising, and Novi’s one instruction was, “Please find us some money to get us out of debt and to rent a very small office so we can stop stealing my sister’s neighbors wifi!”
From supporting communities to managing 5,000 hectares of land in our early days to now overseeing over 1 million hectares, the growth has been nothing short of extraordinary. We are deeply grateful to the supporters, friends, and families who have stood by us on this journey.
Adam and Novi during Planet Indonesia’s early days.
Today, we want to share some of the major lessons we’ve learned over the past decade.
1. Willingness to change
A participant contributes to a workshop session.
One of the most critical lessons has been the need to learn and adapt. While the core pillars of the organization’s work—securing legal rights and access, advancing natural resource governance, and fostering community well-being—have remained somewhat constant, the approaches to achieving these goals have evolved significantly.
For example, we have seriously increased our investment in securing legal tenure and in the early days, didn’t fully embrace how critical tenurial rights were to enabling success. We did some math with our finance team, and we have increased our investment in this area by over 500% in the past 5 years alone.
The truth is the world is changing rapidly: climate systems, ecosystems, and people’s needs are in flux. For any organization to stay relevant, it must embrace change. This doesn’t mean succumbing to mission drift and trying to do everything; it means critically assessing what works and what doesn’t and what might be missing.
For us, this has even meant moving away from one of the organization’s core brands: “conservation cooperative.” As Planet Indonesia increasingly supports a diverse array of governance institutions—forest management units, fisheries bodies, and ecotourism associations—it has become clear that governance is not about fitting into a single structure. Rather, it is about creating simple frameworks and structures that can be adapted to local community aspirations and goals.
2. Data: The Currency of Impact
Field team members work together in a forest, collecting biodiversity data essential to measuring long-term impact and driving change.
From the beginning, we have emphasized the importance of data. Managing data across diverse ecosystems and communities is incredibly challenging, but it is essential. As we emphasized, impact and data are an NGO’s currency.
Data is what is owed to the communities served, the governments collaborated with, and the funders who support the work. It allows Planet Indonesia to demonstrate what is working—and to confront what isn’t. While far from perfect, this commitment to transparency and accountability has been critical to our success.
A major lesson learned is taking time to reflect with your team on two key questions:
Are we measuring the right thing?
Is our data good enough for the stage we are in?
We wish we had taken these questions more to heart early on. In the early days, we sometimes invested in too big of studies when we were better off tailoring the size and scale of the evaluation to the stage we were in. In the first three years, we had already tried to do a fairly large control-treatment study that ended up costing a lot and not really getting us much. While three years in a human health intervention may be a lifetime, trying to capture changes in social-ecological dimensions in such a short amount of time just isn’t realistic.
We have also measured the wrong thing too often than we’d care to admit. It’s better to have 2-3 really good indicators that might be a heavy lift but clearly can show impact than having 15 indicators that all say something different. We still struggle with this as measuring the human, climate, and biodiversity dimensions we work in is tough.
3. Upholding Data Justice
Community members gather in a village meeting, ensuring decisions are rooted in transparency and collective action.
In today’s world, data is power. One area where Planet Indonesia initially fell short was creating adaptive feedback loops that ensure data is easily accessible to local communities, enabling effectively informed decision-making. We learned this the hard way. This realization, underpinned by evaluations showing gaps in data justice and feedback loops (see Miller et al 2024; Thung et al In review), led to the creation of an integrated team combining communications, MEL (monitoring, evaluation, and learning), social science, and technical staff.
Their goal: is to improve and uphold the key principles of data justice, ultimately ensuring data is owned by communities. Early results have demonstrated the power of feedback loops in driving meaningful community action. For instance:
Patrol data on biodiversity and threats spurred a community to explore implementing new sanctions against illegal logging.
A health-focused feedback session prompted the village government to recognize the need for greater advocacy around community nutrition, particularly maternal health.
A session on savings and loans data generated excitement as community members realized the substantial assets they had collectively built and the benefits being reaped through loans.
4. Building Partnerships and Trust
Planet Indonesia's first MOU with JAPESDA in 2022 marked a milestone in expanding collaborations beyond Kalimantan.
In conservation, building genuine relationships is paramount; trust cultivated through these connections leads to meaningful impact. Communities often harbor deep-seated distrust due to past unfulfilled promises from various stakeholders. To overcome this, it's essential to engage sincerely, listen actively, and be present during challenging times, thereby fostering trust that facilitates behavioral change.
While a well-defined theory of change is crucial for setting clear objectives and managing expectations, it's the trust established through authentic relationships that truly drives success in community conservation efforts. We’ve carried this lesson onwards from our work with communities to now our work across Indonesia with local CSO partners.
Another major lesson that has propelled Planet Indonesia to the next level is the importance of partnering with other NGOs. Early on, other NGOs were often viewed as competitors, even threats. The NGO world can sometimes feel like Game of Thrones, with everyone vying for the same funding and striving to stand out.
However, shifting this perspective to see other NGOs as partners changed everything. Instead of competing, opportunities were found to scale grassroots efforts and amplify community-based solutions together. A prime example is the Our Earth Alliance (Aliansi Bumi Kita), an alliance of local NGOs that works collectively to scale community conservation across Indonesia.
5. Building Effective Teams
A discussion among Planet Indonesia team members during a training session.
One of the most significant areas of growth has been building and empowering effective teams. In the early days, our team was small and scrappy, everyone doing a bit of everything. But as the organization grew, we needed to grow our systems and team-management skills.
To be honest, some of the hardest and most emotional lessons learned for us have been about people management and systems. There have been a lot of hugs, tears, and laughs shared in this area over the years.
teams (and we are still learning a lot!):
One-off trainings rarely work: we now prioritize and focus on long-term partnerships, such as our leadership coaching partnership which provides coaching for 5-10 staff annually for 6-12 months. We’ve, in most cases, given up on the idea that one 3-day training on topic X will mean your team comes out on the other side as experts.
Higher Education: Since year three we have offered two annual scholarships for anyone seeking to pursue their master’s or PhD. This has created a healthy level of internal competition but also made clear that our organization is willing to invest in higher education
Build a culture of mentorship: our team internally now has created more than 20-course manuals on everything from how to run a program to learning Excel 101. We’ve learned it’s important to create a culture and system of internal professional development team mentoring teams.
Hire HR and hire early: we wish we had hired and built an HR team much earlier than we have. Some of our darkest days were HR-less.
Don’t shy away from legal advice: especially as your organization grows, it is important you consult with the right experts so that you are not just legally compliant but also protecting your team and organization in line with national and international laws
Invest in soft skills: also something we have learned too late, but soft non-technical skills (e.g. public speaking, facilitation, conflict management) matter! In 2025, we are creating our ‘soft-skills’ matrix that includes competency levels around: public speaking, conflict management critical thinking, facilitation, management (for line managers), and coaching. This matrix provides a framework to help us chart a pathway forward for staff to develop non-technical skills with different proficiency indicators and achievement levels
Perhaps our number one lesson on this is that building effective teams is an ongoing continuous journey. From developing systems and practices, to ensuring we are creating space for reflections, retrospectives, and conducting staff surveys.
As we’ve grown, we’ve learned that the strength of our teams directly shapes the impact of our work.
6. Shifting from a Portfolio of Projects to a Solution-Driven Organization
Planet Indonesia's landscapes across the archipelago.
A key evolution in Planet Indonesia’s journey has been our shift from managing a portfolio of projects to positioning ourselves as an organization with a scalable solution. In the early days, much of our focus was on project-level planning.
We’d dive deep into strategic planning for individual landscapes—marine, terrestrial, and beyond—using tools like problem trees, objective trees, and results chains. While these tools helped, they also created silos, with each landscape operating almost independently. We started becoming an organization of different project sites with different approaches.
What we lacked was a unified, organizational-level strategy—a North Star to guide all our efforts. Since adopting a cohesive strategy, we’ve seen tremendous alignment that enabled faster more effective growth. Our current strategic plan, which runs through 2026, has given us clarity and direction. It’s helped align our work across landscapes and ensure that every initiative contributes to our broader vision.
That said, we know there’s still work to be done. While our current strategy has been transformative, we’re already thinking about what the next iteration will look like—one that builds on our successes and addresses the areas where we can still improve.
7. The Balance of that Big Bet Mindset
A community leader demonstrates sustainable practices to a group.
One of the most nuanced lessons learned over the past decade is the dual-edged nature of having a “big bet” mindset. On one hand, the willingness to dream big and take bold risks has been central to Planet Indonesia’s success. It’s this mindset that allowed growth from managing 5,000 hectares to over 1 million hectares in just ten years.
It’s what pushes the organization to think beyond individual projects and work toward systemic change—ensuring that its approach not only benefits the communities served today but creates a foundation for generations to come.
However, this mindset can also be dangerous - specifically when it is unchecked at the founders’ level. A fixation on the big picture can sometimes overshadow the importance of incremental progress or blind an organization to the realities on the ground. Founders need to listen to their teams and be willing to tap the breaks when the general conversation at the water cooler is ‘its too much too fast. ’Overpromising, overstretching, or focusing solely on grand outcomes can alienate the very communities served - unraveling the foundation of community conservation - trust. Worse, unchecked and unplanned, it can lead to organizational drift, where the desire to scale or achieve transformative impact comes at the cost of staying true to core values and priorities.
The key is balance. It is essential to pair bold vision with humility, ensuring that big bets are grounded in local realities and shaped by community voices. Listen to your team and the communities you work with, they are experts. A big bet mindset works best when it is accompanied by the patience to learn, adapt, and refine strategies along the way. Something we have learned the hard way.
For Planet Indonesia, the big bet is not just about scaling hectares or expanding partnerships; it’s about scaling trust, relationships, and the belief that communities can and should be at the forefront of climate solutions. When approached with care, this mindset becomes less about chasing numbers and more about transformational change.
This balance—dreaming big while staying deeply connected to the communities served—has been one of the most profound and challenging lessons of the past decade. It’s a mindset that will be carried forward into the next ten years.
Here’s to the next decade of growth, innovation, and community leadership. Together, we can achieve extraordinary things.
If you have any questions please reach out via admin@planetindonesia.org. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on our social media Facebook here, Instagram here, and LinkedIn here to get timely updates on our activities, an insider’s look into the lives of front-line conservationists, and ongoing programs.