In the middle of the Panamanian jungle, about an hour northeast of downtown Panama City, lush foliage swathes a 7,000-acre valley. The intense rainy season, which lasts nine months out of the year, inspires rich greens, reds and browns across the landscape.
Situated along the country's central spine of mountains and hills, the valley is home to Kalu Yala, a site only accessible by a narrow, two-mile dirt road. Tents and makeshift structures temporarily dot the area, but it's poised to become the world's most sustainable residential community. Those behind the initiative have made impressive progress, and they believe their work can serve as an alternative, open-source model for urban developers around the globe.
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Kalu Yala, which means "sacred village" in the indigenous Kuna language, comprises two entities — a development company and an increasingly hands-on internship program — that work closely with local villages, support locally owned businesses and responsibly tap into the area's natural resources. The goal is to transcend traditional real estate by bringing together people who seek inspiration, and giving them part ownership of where they live.
The town will combine a number of sustainable best practices to ensure its success. Green, open-air housing will eliminate the need for air conditioning. Clean, off-the-grid energy will power the entire settlement, from using solar battery packs to harnessing electricity from the natural flow of water. A farm-to-table program will decrease the need for imported food and strengthen the local economy. And collaborating with experts and the surrounding community — the people who have lived in Panama their entire lives — will help construct a positive, lasting lifestyle.
The majority of the world's poverty is concentrated in the tropics, where more than 40% of the world's population currently lives. That number is expected to reach 50% by 2050. If all goes according to its 30-year plan, Kalu Yala's design could improve many of the world's historically impoverished tropic regions, and help restore balance to the global allocation of resources.

A sign welcoming visitors to the Kalu Yala site.
Image: Kalu Yala
The story of Kalu Yala really begins 19 years ago, in the suburbs of Atlanta, Ga., when CEO Jimmy Stice was just a 12-year-old playing Sim City and dreaming up the perfect place to live. As the son of a real estate executive, Stice didn't really know anything about his dad's business, but he knew the layout of the Atlanta suburbs wasn't ideal.
"Watching movies like The Sandlot, I thought, 'How the hell do these kids pick up baseball when I can't find five kids my age within biking distance of my house?'" he tells Mashable. "I started to realize that the way we were building the world was really ripping me off."
Stice wanted to create a more dynamic, interactive place that made people — namely himself — happy. But that selfish goal became more of a social issue at age 18, when he visited Costa Rica's low-cost social housing.
"They'd essentially exported the U.S. model of the suburbs, but stripped away the public dollars that support the infrastructure and the private dollars that put the lipstick on it. It really exposes it for what it is, which is these gated, socioeconomic monocultures," he says.
Growing up in a place where you're isolated among people of the exact same demographic means you aren't exposed to any "narratives of where you could go in life."
"It's really limiting the future potential of each individual who's born into these communities, which means that we're limiting our entire society's potential," he says.
Instead of following the traditional real estate track — establishing himself in the industry and "making a bunch of rich men a lot richer" — Stice ended up doing his own market research in Panama, which pointed him to a 575-acre piece of land in May 2007. Perfect for urban development in terms of topography, watersheds and a climate conducive to going off the grid completely, it became the future site of Kalu Yala.

Kalu Yala CEO Jimmy Stice (left) and Stephen Brooks, one of Central America's leading permaculture experts.
Image: Kalu Yala
With help from his father and a slew of advisers, who he says contributed Baby Boomer wisdom to his Gen-Y, passion-driven project, Stice purchased the land from a family in the Los Santos province of Panama's Azuero Peninsula.
According to Stice, Santanian cattle ranchers have cleared 50% of the entire valley's trees since the 1950s. "We'll be [reforesting] on our own properties, but obviously we can't make decisions for other people, especially people who have been there long before us," he says.
They started raising money in 2008, but the U.S. economic collapse forced Stice to rethink the entire project. He turned away from the traditional real estate business model by instituting citizen equity — Kalu Yala's investors would also be its landowners.
The following year, Stice met several college seniors looking for internships. Figuring he could learn from them as they explored their passions in design, business and sustainability, he invited them to work for him. The first intern class formed out of sheer enthusiasm for the project.
Kalu Yala interns are an integral part of the company, working out of three venues with corresponding disciplines: the office in Panama City, dubbed "Casa Yala," for business; the property in the valley for biology, agriculture and outdoor recreation; and a house in San Miguel, the nearby agricultural village, for education and wellness.

Although Stice had established a relationship with the people of San Miguel, which has a population of 500, working in the city prevented him and his team from getting face time with them. There's a difference between having conversations and actually being neighbors with someone, he explains. So in May 2011, they bought a house in the village for full-time representation.
Kalu Yala interns teach for the ministry of education in four schools near San Miguel, which serves a county of 5,000 people. They also research local health issues and discover which resources are available to help address them.
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Biology interns were the first to set up camp in the jungle, analyzing the environmental challenges and, essentially, learning how to survive. They made every decision, composed all research and pitched projects, such as building composting toilets and running water showers. They built "ranchos" — two-level structures made from milled fallen wood and thatched roofing — sleeping on the top level and working below.

Two ranchos — makeshift living and working spaces.
Image: Flickr, TEDxAdventure
In the beginning, all interns were in the business program in the city, where they would conduct essential research for building Kalu Yala.
Stice calls Panama City the "devil you need."
"It has the bankers, lawyers and all those things that let us function in a modern way and do business. It's growing, and doing great things — but it's not Kalu Yala," he says.
Austin Tunnell, who worked as a business intern from January 2013 to April 2013, says he found Kalu Yala by searching online for things like "cool jobs" or "interesting jobs." An audit associate with a degree in accounting and business administration, he wanted to leave the corporate environment. He quit his job in December 2012 and left for Panama a few weeks later.
Tunnell's duties included creating an architectural program, writing investment summaries, producing marketing materials and dabbling in design. It was collaboration, rather than "taking orders."
"It was awesome — and terrifying," he says. "I had no idea how to do any of this stuff... But that's what is so great about Kalu Yala. It's a place to try something new, challenge yourself, learn and discover just how much you are capable of."
Tunnell is currently an economic development volunteer with the Peace Corps in Uganda, and says his Kalu Yala experience inspires a lot of his work — and the overall direction of his life.
"I think I'll go back to school for [sustainable] construction management, and eventually get a master's degree in urban design and development. This all began at Kalu Yala," he says.
Brigitte Desvaux, operations director and chef for the intern program, found Kalu Yala when she needed an internship for her degree in sustainable design studies. She started as a biology intern, and hopped around various full-time positions before she founded the company's farm-to-table program.
Intrigued by the potential of Kalu Yala's relatively new farm, Desvaux began teaching the interns about local cooking and how to use local ingredients for recipes, canning and preserving. She'll have her own interns when the farm-to table program officially launches this summer.
"We've got this very innovative spirit. Different backgrounds and skill sets are coming together to figure out what sustainability means in this environment, and how we can [understand] the land before anyone develops on it," she says.

Kalu Yala's farm-to-table program will ensure that 80% of all food comes from within walking distance of the site.
Image: Flickr, TEDxAdventure
The company has a policy of only hiring former interns, those who understand the cultural immersion better than anyone. It will eventually become a non-profit, called the Kalu Yala Institute. It currently has 10 full-time former intern employees, five full-time Panamanian local employees, and has brought over more than 200 students from 16 countries, 44 states and 130 colleges.
Stice says Kalu Yala's best practice is its publicly stated intention to build the world's most sustainable community. It invites supporters as well as skeptics, all of whom can help improve the project.
The town will be off the grid entirely, getting its energy from three sources: solar for the day-to-day, a micro-hydroelectric system for base load power (without changing pH, temperature or species migration within the watersheds) and a tertiary generator that kicks in for any atypical loads. The site also sits on top of a large aquifer that produces clean water naturally, and rainwater catchment and storage prepares for the dry season.

Solar-powered lights hang above a farm at Kalu Yala.
Image: Flickr, TEDxAdventure
The development company plans to break ground in May. Studio Sky, a company focused on "smart dwellings for the tropics" that are both affordable and socially empowering, designed the houses.
The first, 2,000-square-foot cottage will have an indoor-outdoor design: Walls will enclose half, while the other half will be an outdoor, covered terrace. Because the valley has a temperature swing from 68 degrees at night to 85 degrees during the day, the houses won't need air conditioning; instead, they will use thermal massing and passive design.
Each house should take three months to build, but the first will take closer to six, as the team will tweak and engineer throughout construction.
Stice's goal is to sell 20 houses per year — no more.

Design sketches of the first Kalu Yala houses, from Studio Sky.
Image: Studio Sky
"Rather than going with the real estate industry's traditional obsession with volume, by intentionally creating a slow-go scenario, it allows us to both control that growth and learn in a more deliberate manner," he says.
Kalu Yala will be carbon neutral or carbon negative, and 80% of all food will come from within the country of Panama (aided by Desvaux's farm-to-table program). They're also starting a regional happiness index, measuring how Kalu Yala affects the county's wellbeing.
Right now, the company's main goal is to open the campground to people around the world. Kalu Yala hosted TEDxAdventure in early January, where entrepreneurs and innovators — from companies such as KAMMOK, Tactivate, Patagonia and GoalZero — gathered to learn more about Stice's mission firsthand. They also ran and attended workshops specific to the area, such as jungle survival, permaculture lifestyle and sustainable infrastructure.

But when the campground opens later this month, a wider range of people will be able to experience what Kalu Yala and Panama's culture have in store.
"Kalu Yala is really trying to become the hub for sustainability in the tropics, and [become] a 'tropical laboratory' to experiment and develop products that can be exported to the entire tropical belt around the world," Stice says.
"There's that old saying, 'If you build it, they will come.' But we like to say, 'If they come, they will build it.'"
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