Brett Jenks, Rare’s CEO, blogs about his trip to Asia, where he visited Pride campaigns taking place in China and Indonesia. Follow Brett’s adventures as he witnesses local conservation efforts to protect endangered species in Asia and shares how the Pride campaign model can support lasting conservation impact in this part of the world.

On the 6th we met with Rare’s China Advisory Committee to update them on Rare’s strategy and to get their feedback on conservation priorities that we should be addressing.

Huang Gang, Rare Pride campaign manager from Meili Snow Mountain Nature Reserve presents conservation challenges and proposed solutions at his site.

The committee is co-chaired by Rare’s VP for Asia, Nigel Sizer and Shaomin Zhang, the Secretary General of the China Environmental Culture and Promotion Association (CECPA), which is affiliated with China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP).

Thanks to the work of our China team, Rare’s partnerships have come a long way in the past two years. We know making an impact here will take collaborating with a diverse mix of people, which I think we have on the committee. The advisory committee is an impressive group with deep experience in conservation, academia, US-China relations, and business management. Hats off to Nigel and company for putting this group together, as well as the generosity of the following members who agreed to support Rare’s efforts to expand environmental education in China:

• Ligang Jin, Chairman of Stonebridge China, a government affairs consultancy, who negotiated on behalf of China’s entry into the WTO.
• Edward Tian, chairman of China Broadband, a private equity firm. Tian has a PhD in natural resource management and serves on The Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific Council.
• Shawn Zhang is the China Director for The Nature Conservancy.
• Yuming Yang is the Vice President of Southwest Forestry College.
• Changua Wu is the Greater China Director for The Climate Group.
• Xuemin Shao is the chief representative in Asia for the Nordic Investment Bank.
• Jun Ma is Director of the Public and Environmental Affairs Research Center.

Rare’s National Advisory Committee in China.  From left:  Professor Yuming Yang, Southwest Forestry College;  Brett Jenks, CEO, Rare; TNC China director Shawn Zhang;  Xuemin Shao, Nordic Investment Bank,  Changua Wu, The Group China; Nigel Sizer, Vice President Rare Asia.

We spent much of our time together discussing Rare’s new emphasis on identifying local conservation solutions — energy efficient architecture, fuel efficient wood stoves, community managed fisheries and forests. We then discussed scaling them by training a network of local leaders to mobilize communities to adopt them. When we first started talking with CECPA and the Ministry of Environmental Protection we were only talking about environmental awareness, which is obviously a big issue in China.

But over time Rare has learned that raising awareness isn’t enough. Even if people want to make changes they need help overcoming the basic barriers to change. In rural China, there are cultural barriers, economic challenges and sometimes technical complexities to address. So, Rare wants to pick one new solution each year and roll out a dozen projects in a dozen sites to begin to disseminate what works. Fortunately, our advisory council fully agrees.

CECPA’s Secretary General is keen to build public awareness of environmental challenges in China and is outspoken in his support of Rare’s approach to doing so at the local level.

After an informal lunch with the Advisory Committee, we headed to the airport (once again, Beijing in a day!) for our trip to Kunming, Shangri La and then Meili Snow Mountain, one of the Tibetan Buddhists’ most sacred sites (not to mention the site of a Rare Pride campaign run in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, designed to inspire green building and reduce fuelwood consumption among the Tibetan people of Yunnan Province).

>>Brett’s Slideshow

>>Rare CEO Visits Asia – Arrival in Beijing

Brett Jenks, Rare’s CEO, blogs about his trip to Asia, where he visited Pride campaigns taking place in China and Indonesia. Follow Brett’s adventures as he witnesses local conservation efforts to protect endangered species in Asia and shares how the Pride campaign model can support lasting conservation impact in this part of the world.

View a slideshow of Brett’s trip to China and Indonesia and get ready for more blogging from Rare’s CEO!

>>Brett’s Slideshow

>>Rare CEO Visits Asia – Arrival in Beijing

>>Learn about Rare Pride campaign sites

Brett Jenks, Rare’s CEO, blogs about his trip to Asia, where he visited Pride campaigns taking place in China and Indonesia. Follow Brett’s adventures as he witnesses local conservation efforts to protect endangered species in Asia and shares how the Pride campaign model can support lasting conservation impact in this part of the world.

I’ve been to Beijing three times now, and I have to yet to see the Great Wall or visit The Forbidden City (just never seem to find the time), but I have greatly enjoyed beginning to work with some of China’s environmental and civic leaders to figure out what Rare can do to make a difference in China.

I arrived at sunset and after passing through customs and immigration, made it to the hotel in time to have one meeting before bedtime. Nigel Sizer, Rare’s regional VP for Asia, Shiyang Li, Rare’s director for China and Robert Delfs, in his first week as a consultant to Rare, joined me for dinner. The plan for this trip was pretty simple:

• Beijing in a day and meet with Rare’s China Advisory Committee.
• Spend five days hiking up and down Meili Snow Mountain in Yunnan Province to visit a Rare Pride campaign there.
• Meetings in Kunming, Yunnan, at Rare’s China office, which I haven’t visited since it opened a year ago.
• Fly to Indonesia to meet with Rare staff and partners in Jakarta and Bali and then head home.

Along the way, the plan was to plant the seeds for future partnerships and funding opportunities, while working with my team to learn what we can do to improve our work in the field.

Of course there are also more mundane considerations: Shiyang basically said of the rural portion of our trip, “be prepared for bed bugs, altitude sickness and diarrhea.” (And to think that I was mostly just trying to manage jet lag.)

I was pleased when Robert, who lived in Beijing and Hong Kong for over ten years as editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, gave me my first tip: When in rural China, use hand sanitizer before every meal and carry your own chopsticks. This turned out to be great advice.

>>Learn about Rare Pride campaign sites

July 13, 2009

Feel the excitement!

What a treat! 40  Latin American alumni of Rare’s Pride program are gathered together in Guadalajara, Mexico this week to share stories, reflect on their past experiences, and explore possibilities for launching an alumni network.   I plan on attending two full days of their retreat in order to see what I can learn from them, and to get a sense for myself of the benefits of investing in an alumni organization.

I am not sure I have much with which to compare this program.   My MBA program at Georgetown holds a number of alumni events.  Some are purely social. They are basically cocktail parties.  Some are slightly more business-oriented, such as networking fairs.  Others offer educational opportunities, guest speakers, seminars, even trips.  For the most part, the Georgetown grads are on the receiving end of free alcohol, networking opportunities, and the occasional lecture series.   The alumni don’t produce new knowledge, they don’t often share their own stories except interpersonally, and there is no organized way for us to work together to advance our individual or collective work.  But then again, I doubt many graduates even have these expectations.   For the university, I’m sure the ultimate measure of success for alumni relations is fundraising.  They’re good at this.  In fact, Georgetown just opened a state-of-the-art business school that was paid for with alumni funds.

Rare’s idea of an alumni gathering is a little different.  Let’s start with the goal. We simply want to offer an opportunity to Rare’s past partners to reconnect, gain some additional training, share stories, and if they so desire redefine their partnership with Rare.  While I haven’t yet had a chance to ask them personally, my guess is that many Pride alumni want help running additional campaigns, or they want additional training. Some will want help identifying funding sources to pay for ongoing behavior change efforts;  others want to simply hear what’s going on with other campaigns in the region.

I have my own interests of course.  I’d like to see these local conservation leaders collaborating throughout the region to achieve a host of new objectives, for example:  building greater demand for social change models within the environmental community, perhaps by helping organizations recognize that human behavior is the root cause of environmental challenges;  creating a virtual community of social marketing practices; mentoring newly trained campaign managers or at least following their campaigns and encouraging them along; helping Rare track campaign impacts much longer than the 1-2 year timeframes we’ve grown accustomed to; helping us recruit new sites and new partners as we expand over time; and challenging and supporting us as we try to develop a platform for all this collaboration.

But let’s see what they have to say….

July 14, 2009

Day One – though I spent it on airplanes getting here – was apparently quite good.  If the photo sessions before dinner were any indication, this looks a lot like a Latin America reunion.   It’s a pretty animated group.   Sharon Price, who worked with a team to organize this event, had this to say about day one.

Watch video clip of Sharon!

…Too bad I missed the yoga.
A couple of interesting tidbits I’ll follow up on today:

Elizabeth Cabrera from Paraguay is now launching her THIRD Pride campaign. No Rare funding, no ongoing support, but she’s  won an Overbrook Fellowship, started a Master’s in Sustainable Development at National University, and she’s launching a third campaign.  Not bad for a young woman who only graduated college in 2002.  Here’s a quick interview with her on day one:

Hear Elizabeth as she explains (in Spanish and Guarani, her native language in Paraguay), how exciting it is to be in this reunion and closes with, “I love the Rare family and feel like part of it.”
Stay tuned for more highlights!

Brett Jenks talked with two graduates of the Rare nature guide training course and shares their experiences.

Two graduates of the first course, Pancho Mayoral and Maldo Fisher, shared their stories with us. Pancho had been a young fisherman and hadn’t finished high school when he entered Rare’s program 10 years ago. He was a turtle poacher in the off-season, knowingly breaking the law in order to generate income for his family. Today, he has his own sea kayaking business and runs intensive trips for the National Outdoor Leadership School, NOLS. He hasn’t poached a turtle since 1995.

Pancho Mayoral, left, with Brett Jenks

Maldo was a fisherman and a boat driver for a new, expat-run whale watching operation in 1995. Today, Maldo runs his own business from the shores of San Ignacio. He has 10 cabanas on the beach, solar and wind power, and a central dining palapa that serves fantastic seafood and very cold beer. When Maldo joined the program 10 years ago, he made on average about $200-$300 per month as a boat driver during the whale watching season. This year, he expects 600 mostly North American visitors will let him gross nearly $200,000 in just three months from his own whale watching camp. Maldo also offers greatly reduced packages for school groups from Baja to ensure that Mexican children can also be inspired by the world’s largest mammalian migration.

Together, they described the role that local communities played in the international effort to stop the expansion of Mitsubishi’s Salt Works in the Lagoon. NRDC and IFAW and Grupo de Los Cien ran an international campaign to help stop the Salt Works, but it was the local fishermen and whale watching guides, entrepreneurs in search of a sustainable economy in ecotourism, that legitimized the campaign and gave credence to a homegrown vision of sustainable development. So, for about $200,000 in training and technical assistance, we leveraged a financial ROI that more than justifies the investment, not to mention a conservation constituency that’s already helped “save” the place once and will surely be there as long as the whales are.

These are just 2 of the 20 trained in El Vizcaíno, and just 2 of the 56 trained in Baja California, and just 2 of the more than 300 trained in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and South Africa in the past 10 years. I’ve asked our staff to invest in a more thorough and objective assessment of the ROI and will report back again sometime soon. But the point is: We need to make sure we don’t let the complexity and challenge of measuring conservation success get in the way of actually achieving it.

Rare President and CEO Brett Jenks talks about a recent board trip to Baja California, Mexico. This is the first of two posts.

We recently returned from a Rare board of directors meeting in Loreto, Baja California, where we visited a new pilot project called Fisheries Fellows. Rare is training and mentoring six Mexican fellows, each of whom will spend two years working with fishing cooperatives in six different towns on the Gulf of California. We designed the program with Packard Foundation with several goals in mind: 1) sustainable benthic fisheries; 2) future fisheries leaders; and 3) a model for ramping up the human resource pool for fisheries in Mexico. Huge challenges of course.

We spent our first day in Baja visiting a sea cucumber fishery with some local cooperative members and a few of the fellows. Great way to get the board more hands-on experience with a fishery and a great way to add context to the many serious concerns that come up when we consider new programs: how to measure success in the short term (sustainability plans are feasible, but we’ll need to monitor the actual fishery for much longer to know that we’ve had an impact), what constitutes success (one out of six, six out of six), potential demand for and scalability of this model if it works out, etc.

The second day we flew over El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve to San Ignacio Lagoon to go whale watching and to meet some past graduates of our nature guide training programs there. At the time we started training bilingual local nature guides, 10 years ago, we struggled with the same questions we are now faced with in the Fisheries Fellows program. We wonder: Would guides get jobs? Would they start careers in ecotourism? Would they be able to compete? If they did, how many people could they employ? Would a burgeoning ecotourism economy create a culture of conservation? Was a $10,000 investment in training one guide justifiable? What would be the conservation ROI?

What we saw in San Ignacio was wholly inspiring. Sixteen of the twenty graduates of Rare’s guide training programs in the biosphere reserve are still guiding. Many are managing their own businesses. Many are involved with international and local conservation NGOs. They are community leaders. They teach environmental education in local schools. One has produced a widely used bird checklist for the reserve. Another is an expert kayak guide leader and NOLS instructor.