Conservation in a New Nation Workshop
March 16-17 at Essex Conference Center, Essex, MA
Tuition: $525; Room and Board: $105 Register
About This Workshop
This two-day intensive workshop helps conservationists strengthen the practice of conservation by ensuring future innovation and responsiveness to present-day challenges. It is a chance to talk openly and safely about how to diversify in order to maintain competitive edge and leadership and how to collaborate with facets of the larger community, thereby broadening bases of support, developing meaningful new relationships and engaging more public citizens on the issues.
The Need: Conservation everywhere in America faces a strategic challenge to methods, delivery systems and constituencies. This challenge has emerged quite profoundly as a “perfect storm” of factors: the changing demographics of our nation coupled with the narrowing of constituent groups for conservation groups. How do conservationists engage with a changing American public?
Demographers predict that by 2042—in one generation—people of color will be the statistical majority in every metropolitan region of the United States. Today, 40% of all Americans under the age of 16 are people of color. These changes within our nation are to be celebrated because they bring new ideas and vigor and because people of color have traditionally been strong supporters of conservation. But, today, conservation and environmentalism includes far fewer people of color. How can conservation groups adapt? What needs to evolve within conservation so that more people of color see themselves within the story of conservation?
All of these factors beg important questions: Who will steward conserved lands in 2042? Who will support bond acts? Who will support land use policies? If significant steps are not taken now to diversify conservation groups -- whose supporters are overwhelmingly white and aging -- who will support these institutions in the next generation? Who will defeat the growing number of cases of imminent domain seizing conservation lands? Who will be the stewards of our lands and communities?
Many leading conservation organizations are realizing that to succeed and become the powerful force in American culture they can be, they must build bridges, find common ground among diverse groups, and unite ecological and social healing. Leading groups are recognizing that saving land and species is not possible in isolation from creating healthy, equitable human communities.
The opportunities for change are an expanded membership, greater public engagement and understanding, deeper collaborations, more funding, more legislative victories, and the chance to move beyond “landscape–scale” to “culture-scale” conservation. This is the extraordinary opportunity for all conservation groups today: to help create healthy people and whole communities, while at the same time building stronger, more resilient support for conservation itself. This workshop will explore all of these themes and spend time on specific tools and skills needed to implement change.
Faculty
Peter Forbes worked at the New England director for the Trust for Public Land for 18 years before founding the Center for Whole Communities, where the focus of his work has been on building alliances and dialogue between environmental and social concerns. He brings a tremendous depth of experience and study to this particular topic.
Mohamad Chakaki holds a Masters of Environmental Management with a focus on Urban Ecology and Environmental Design from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Mohamad is an excellent facilitator with a broad perspective on the nexus of environmental and social concerns, particular as they involve visioning and planning for the future.
Location and Times
The Essex Conference Center is a graceful, quiet setting in Essex, MA, just north of Boston. The year-round facility is tucked amidst 18 acres of white pines and oaks, less than a mile from the ocean and surrounded by 250 acres of conservation land. The very reasonable price of $105 included spacious and private accomodations, and all meals during your stay.
The workshop starts at 4 pm on the first day and includes an evening reception and workshop session. It will end at 5 pm on Thursday, March 17. Breakfast and lunch are included. We do very strongly encourage participants of the workshop to stay in residence for the entire time, in order to have a full experience and help to create a community with others during our time together. Also for the reason, we ask you to leave your laptops at home and to use phone only in case of emergency.
Cost
Tuition for the workshop is $550. Room and meals is an additional $105. Your organization may benefit most from this workshop if you bring at least two staff members, making it easier to build on these ideas with peers after the workshop. With this in mind we are offering half-price tuition for every second member of the same organization.
Link here to the registration page. You will be asked to fill out a simple form, pay a $35 registration fee, and then we will get back to you with full details and an invoice once we confirm your registration. Register
Feel free to call us with any questions (Lauren Oleet, Program Manager, 802-496-5690; Lauren@wholecommunities.org).
We have led this workshop for dozens of conservation groups, including most recently The Nature Conservancy, The Conservation Trust of North Carolina, The Peconic Land Trust and the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.