A Journey to a New Horizon

In the wake of the failures in his personal life and in the Borneo rainforest protection campaign, Jeffrey decided to refocus his energies on what had originally inspired him to protect the living planet and humanity — travel in beautiful natural areas with extraordinary people who are working to protect those places. He decided that he wanted to provide young people with the type of formative experiences he had enjoyed on his visits to Haida Gwaii during his teenaged years. He also believed that being close to the energies of young people inspired by such experiences would help him rejuvenate his feelings of hope for the world. He formed Leadership Initiative For Earth (LIFE) and over the next eight years more than 1,400 young people participated in LIFE’s inventive programs.

The flagship program of LIFE was his brainchild called the LIFEboat Flotilla. Two-hundred teenagers plus 100 educators and crew were brought together annually on a flotilla of 15 small ships for a week of exploration through a sheltered archipelago on Canada's Pacific coast. The LIFEboat Flotilla enabled participants to experience the enchanting sense of adventure and group bonding inherent in travel on a small, cramped boat. Yet, uniquely, the LIFEboat Flotilla also created the conditions for experiencing the euphoric social dynamic of a conference of two hundred like-minded teenagers.

During the daytime of a Flotilla journey, the 15 boats would fan out to different islands and the young people (organized in groups of 10) participated in hands-on workshops held on beaches, in forests, or from the deck of their ship. These workshops were led by experts in the given subjects, which included marine biology, First Nations culture, sustainable forestry, and ocean conservation. During the evenings, the ships would rendezvous and anchor, enabling everyone to go ashore to rural community halls for plenary sessions from such internationally renowned presenters as Jean-Michel Cousteau, Robert Bateman, Dr. Joe MacInnis, and Dr. Jane Goodall.

The logistics of the LIFEboat Flotillas were immense and required a team of staff and volunteers months to organize. On any given day there could be 40 site-specific workshops and a plenary session, repeated in different locations every day for a week as the Flotilla traveled throughout the islands. Storms and tides often played havoc with the logistics of keeping the Flotilla together and safe. The LIFEboat Flotilla was the only program of its kind in the world and it attracted the patronage of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). There were five LIFEboat Flotilla sailings, while a similar program for WWF sailed in 2008. As Jeffrey had hoped, the Flotillas were enormously inspiring and educational for the 800 young people (plus hundreds of adult crew and staff) who participated. Young people gave him the moniker "Captain Adventure".

Further Innovations

Buoyed by the success of the LIFEboat Flotillas, the LIFE organization spearheaded a sister program, the LIFEtrain, in which young people traveled on a train throughout a rural part of Canada, stopping for educational workshops and plenaries en route. However, Jeffrey's most ambitious project during the LIFE years was one that never happened. He envisioned young people and professional shipwrights building a wooden tall ship from timbers harvested from the world's most ecologically managed forests. The LIFEship would then have been used for youth expeditions in ecological hotspot locations globally. Despite two years of effort in which he recruited an esteemed tall ship builder and $600,000 in pledges, the LIFEship project proved to be too complex to undertake and was abandoned while still on the drawing board.

LIFE programs were made feasible by a funding formula that involved the participants raising about half of the funds within their communities while LIFE's fundraising success with foundations, governments, and companies provided the balance. Many charities discover that their institutional funders cease supporting them after a few years and move on to other organizations (hence the charities are perpetually cultivating new potential donors). This pitfall happened with LIFE and it was not possible to sustain the organization with funding from the young participants alone.

The swan song for LIFE was one of its most innovative programs, called LIFEquest. An international team of young people spent an extraordinary month creating documentary films in several languages while camping on remote islands on Canada’s Pacific coast. At the time, Apple Inc considered the utilization of laptop computers to edit video in a wilderness setting a pioneering activity and they donated the hardware and software for LIFEquest.

Jeffrey received significant recognition during the LIFE years including CBC Television’s The National “Canadian Hero”, Maclean’s Magazine's “100 Canadians to Watch”, and The Vancouver Sun newspaper's “B.C.’s 25 Most Influential: Next Wave”. He was also the subject of the television documentary "Jeff Gibbs: Life Voyages".