We carried one idea into a single community in Palestine. It was a small idea, and honestly, it was enough. The people there took it and made it theirs, and it crossed borders on its own: Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Morocco. Twenty years later it's still running, and they own it entirely. That's what we build: work that communities make their own, that puts people in the driver's seat and outlasts the consultant who helped start it. The proof that money is not everything is a program that no longer needs you.
I build things that hold.
I'm Naser Arda. I design and deliver programs that had every reason to fail, and I have watched them last. TalPlay is where that work is done now.
I sit at an unusual intersection: economics, the environment, and technology. It keeps the research grounded in what happens on the ground, and it means that, at the end of the thinking, something exists. A plan. A curriculum. A facility. A map. A product. Something that still works when I'm not in the room.
I've worked in communities and countries where development work stops being an abstraction. You know what a good program feels like from the receiving end and what a careless one costs.
That perspective has followed me into every context I've worked in. It's with me now, on this coast, in this work.
Based in BC. Working across Canada and internationally.
Right now, my desk faces the Pacific.
Three intersections shape my current work: economics, the environment, and technology.
In First Nations community and economic development, that means relationship-first, sovereignty-aware work in British Columbia, on the community's timeline, not mine.
In the seaweed sector, it means Seaweed Economy (seaweedeconomy.com), which I built and run. It is the economics and business resource for the seaweed sector. It brings together available information on seaweed prices, costs and buyers in Canada and the United States, alongside practical tools and guides covering markets, funding and regulation. When reliable figures have not been published, it says so. More on the seaweed work.