In 1999, OnePlanet's founder and current president, ethnobiologist Dr. Michael Gilmore, arrived in Maijuna territory and was impressed by the area's biological and cultural richness. From that moment on, he developed a long-standing relationship of collaboration and trust with the Maijuna, which led to a wide variety of biological and cultural conservation projects, as well as community organization and management. He advised on the formation of the Federation of Maijuna Native Communities (FECONAMAI) in 2004 and then led a multi-year project to map their ancestral territory and subsequently, at the request of the Maijuna and Kichwa peoples, established the Maijuna Kichwa Regional Conservation Area (ACRMK), which has conserved 391,000 hectares of primary forest since 2015.

Since 2015, we formally began our work as OnePlanet, a non-profit, non-governmental organization that supports Amazonian communities in building a more sustainable future to effectively preserve and manage forests and their resources through community organization and well-being, as well as the territory, culture, and identity of Indigenous peoples, primarily the Maijuna people in the Napo-Putumayo landscape and the ACRMK.