This blog post was written by Paul Butler.  Mr. Butler led Rare’s first Pride campaign in the late 1970’s to save the endangered St. Lucian parrot and continues his conservation leadership today as Rare’s Senior Vice President, Global Programs.

This is part four of a series of posts from Mr. Butler on his campaign visit to Andavadoaka in Madagascar. His first post talked about how Rare is evaluating our first cross-regional campaign review, while the second post was on how Madagascar is a biological marvel, but it faces grave threats. His third post is about how conservation is all about people.

What did we find?

Our team, which included Dale Galvin, COO, Daniel Hayden, Global Program Operations, and Annalisa Bianchessi, Madagascar Pride Program Manager, and I spent several days with Madagascar Campaign Manager Gildas Andriamalala evaluating progress to date. We met with fishers who were the target of the campaign, community leaders from the target area and neighboring villages, as well as the campaign team itself. We visited the reef, spoke to monitoring experts and traveled by boat and 4WD to the communities that are the focus of the campaign, and saw some of the materials that Gildas has produced.  Here are some of the highlights from our findings:

Successes

Level of Engagement by Blue Ventures
We were very pleased to see the level of understanding about the Pride campaign by the leadership of the lead agency partner, BlueVentures.  This level of interest is not only key in providing Gildas the support he needs to improve the campaign, but also for ensuring that the Pride campaign fits into Blue Venture’s organizational strategy.  Overall, we have found that a high level of engagement by the management team of the partner organization is a leading indicator that the Pride campaign will be a success and have lasting impact.

Knowledge Transfer
One of the goals of every Pride campaign is to develop local capacity, not just within the campaign manager, but also within the local partner.  The fact that Shawn Peabody (Project Coordinator) for Blue Ventures has used many of the tools in Pride to help write a management plan is a key sign of this knowledge transfer.  In addition, we were thrilled to hear that Shawn is writing an article for MacArthur Foundation on social marketing.

Monitoring Protocols
For a relatively small organization, we found Blue Ventures impressive in their willingness and capacity to monitor biological resources. It is exceptional that an organization can so closely track the life cycle of a conservation target over such a long period.

Gilda’s Professional Growth
Often, a campaign manager returns from Pride training with greater self-confidence and more skills, but the changes may go unnoticed.  What was great to see was that Gildas not only feels more confident, but also that Blue Ventures founder and research director, Alasdair Harris, and Shawn both noticed improvements in Gildas’ project management skills, strategic thinking skills and communication skills.

Improvement Areas

Leveraging Volunteers and Keeping the Message Fresh
One of the keys of successful Pride campaigns is to create a social movement and that is keen to support the campaign and be involved.  The campaign needs to engage with volunteers, like the local student group, and train local messengers to keep the campaign alive.  This is especially important because the campaign is constrained by inadequate transportation (Gildas does not have unlimited funds for travel, and he cannot travel alone) and the logistical challenges of the site.  For example, the campaign would benefit from having one person in each key village to act as an emissary for the campaign.  The collateral could reach that person through other BV staff or volunteers who could leave Andavadoaka and drop off supplies of fresh materials, and provide news and ideas for distributing materials.

Target Audience Selection
The team from Rare believed that in order for enforcement to be fair and credible, the campaign should do some targeted marketing to beach seiners and poison fishers outside the Velondriake coast.  They also need to understand the laws and that “real Vezo” don’t beach seine or poison fish.  This outreach could simply entail a conversation with their leaders and a fact sheet.  However, to exclude these groups from the campaign might mean a potential loss of support and lead to a turf war.

Barrier Removal Strategy Relies Exclusively on Law Enforcement
A core element of a great Pride campaigns is the community’s sense of pride about where they live and pride in their community.   Respect for the Dina (the traditional court in Madagascar) is to show pride in one’s heritage. That said, Dina enforcement also has the potential to create conflict.  Therefore, Rare stressed the need for Blue Ventures to assess additional behavior changes that all the coastal communities could adopt.  The tactics for encouraging the behavior change might include:

• Training on correct and sustainable fishing techniques
• Community events in which people convert their nets that have very fine netting to bigger netting
• Loan/lease new nets with appropriate netting to fishers so they can try them
• Using the money from the collection of fines to help finance the purchase of new nets for fishers.

The Road Ahead
Blue Ventures took our recommendations in the spirit in which we delivered them and, has since made great progress. Earlier this month Shawn Peabody wrote:

“I have received and reviewed the detailed report that you sent us. We would like to thank you again for your great visit and your feedback on our campaign. We’ve found the visit very helpful in energizing our team and focusing our efforts on a few key areas. I am happy to report that we have hired a new staff member who will be in charge of Dina enforcement capacity building. In other news, Nosy Be just successfully prosecuted a Morombe migrant for trespassing in the sea cucumber area and fined him a full 100,000 Ariary (approximately US$45). The Nosy Be president has come a long way in the last year — before, he rarely reported poison fishing or poaching in the reserve.  Now, he led a group of village elders and pirogue owners to enforce one of the largest fines in Velondriake history. We still have a lot of work to do, but things are looking good”.

Pictured above is Nauda Marcilli, a village elder and president of the Northern region of the site. He told us he is committed to helping stop destructive fishing but feels it is hard to enforce laws on people in the neighboring communities.

Gildas’ campaign posters hang in the local coffee shop, also part of Nauda’s home.

Juvenile fish have been collected by Nauda as evidence of the detrimental effects of poison fishing.

Community members listen to Gildas’ Pride campaign song in the village of Bevatu.

A boat sail with Gildas’ campaign message was created by a local artist (second from left), Gildas, and his supervisor Shawn Peabody (on the right).

The campaign boat, first time at sea with the new campaign sail that the campaign created. (Daniel Hayden and Dale are helping carry it to sea)

Campaign manager Gildas Andriamalala, Daniel Raberinary (octopus scientist and key player in the establishment of the Velondriake MPA), Paul Butler and Dale Galvin on what turned out to be somewhat of an epic pirogue journey.

Local pirogues, some sails are truly a patchwork but mostly they are white sails that could easily be painted and be used as “living billboards at sea”.

Reaching Morombe, the biggest town north of the site where the neighboring Saraha people live. Some of the Saraha fishers migrate to the Velondriake MPA every day to fish using illegal methods such as poison fishing and beach seine netting.

Morombe is a larger town as the cargo from some of the vessels demonstrates in the photo above.

Meeting with Dai (left), a school teacher and politician in Morombe who is an advocate and key opinion leader for the Saraha people living in Morombe.

Meeting with the Fisheries Control Agency officer based in Morombe.

A few kilometers out of the village of Andavadoaka is the Spiny Forest with baobab trees shown above.

This blog post was written by Paul Butler.  Mr. Butler led Rare’s first Pride campaign in the late 1970’s to save the endangered St. Lucian parrot and continues his conservation leadership today as Rare’s Senior Vice President, Global Programs.

This part three of a series of posts from Mr. Butler on his campaign visit to Andavadoaka in Madagascar. His first post talked about how Rare is evaluating our first cross-regional campaign visit, while the second post was on how Madagascar is a biological marvel, but it faces grave threats.

There is a popular misconception that conservation is principally about plants and animals and the physical environment that they live in.

In reality, conservation is just as much about people as it is about fauna and flora. People lie behind most environmental threats — whether it be fuelwood collection, dynamite fishing for protein, chemical run-off or setting fires for agricultural expansion. And it is only people that can drive solutions. Those solutions can be alternatives to fuelwood sources or more efficient stoves, training in sustainable fishing techniques, enhanced pollution controls or better regulation and enforcement.

People are thus the key to conservation, and the focus of Rare’s work around the world. Indeed two of our three measures of success pertain to “people.” Our first “C” (Capacity) refers to the training we give our campaign managers to better enable them to launch effective campaigns, and the second “C” (Constituencies) refers to the community support our campaigns strive to generate — support that creates an enabling environment for sustainable resource-use to take root. (See blog post dated May 11th for a more detailed description of Rare’s 3 C’s.)

It is no wonder, then, that the focus of our cross-regional visit to Madagascar would be to meet and engage with the people who drive our campaigns and those upon whom it focuses.

The success (or otherwise) of our campaign in Madagascar lies in the hands of a truly dedicated group of conservationists that make up Blue Ventures, including its founder and research director, Alasdair Harris, project coordinator, Shawn Peabody and Rare campaign manager, Gildas Andriamalala.

Above, Gildas in Andavadoaka.

Gildas first joined Blue Ventures to work on the socio-economic monitoring of Andavadoaka. He has a law degree from the University of Toliara and has worked on the legal aspects of both the establishment of theVelondriake Marine Protected Area (MPA) and the land acquisition issues relating to the Andavadoaka community Eco-lodge project. In February 2009, he became part of Rare’s PEP 1 cohort that trained at Georgetown University in a Master’s in Communication program that is awarded by the University of Texas at El Paso.

Gildas’s campaign is striving to develop a more sustainable approach to fisheries management along Madagascar’s Andavadoaka coast within the Velondriake Marine protected Area (MPA). The aim is to increase juvenileseagrass and mangrove fish, which will replenish the reef fish population, through the reduction of the amount of poison fishing and beach seine netting. These threats will be reduced by informing the local people of the damage done by destructive fishing and by working with the heads of 24 local villages to increase the enforcement of the local Dina (legislation) and encouraging fishers to adopt more sustainable practices.

Shawn Peabody showing us the plant from which Laru (a poisonous white paste used for poison fishing) is derived. Unfortunately, the plant is readily available all along the Velondriake coastline.

Since many of the area’s beach seine fishers come from neighboring communities, setting up and enforcing local patrol efforts will be critical and getting local leaders to enforce regulations is essential. Gildas’s strategy for success reads:

“To eliminate the principal threat posed to the sustainability of the marine resources and habitat in the South West coast of Madagascar, the use of unsustainable fishing practices must be stopped, to the extent that this behavior becomes socially unacceptable in partner communities. Fishers and other stakeholders will be made conscious of the threats to their livelihoods and cultures caused by target unsustainable practices, and will be made aware of the social, environmental, cultural and economic benefits of using the right methods to improve marine resource sustainability and community life.”

So our team needed to talk first to Gildas to check in on the status of his campaign and his outreach efforts, as well as to meet Shawn and Alasdair to get a lead agency perspective on progress. But that would not be enough; Rare’s team also needed to visit the fishers themselves to ask them if they had heard of the campaign, understood its messages, and seen the collateral that Gildas had produced.

We would need to take to the sea and visit outlying communities and meet with beach seine fishers, village leaders, and other stakeholders to verify some of the assumptions that underlie Gildas’s campaign — all in a couple of days. To accomplish these objectives the team split up: Daniel Hayden, Rare’s director of Global Programs Operations, and I would focus on meeting Gildas and key fishers in the Velondriake area. We would combine efforts to travel to adjoining fisher communities, while Rare’s COO Dale Galvin would take to the sea to look at the underwater world that Gildas and his colleagues were trying to protect – the spectacular coral reefs.

Watch Gildas talking about his campaign:

If the above embedded video does not work, please click here to view it.

In the next and final blog post, we will discuss our findings.

You can learn more about Gildas’s campaign by visiting RarePlanet.

This blog post was written by Paul Butler.  Mr. Butler led Rare’s first Pride campaign in the late 1970’s to save the endangered St. Lucian parrot and continues his conservation leadership today as Rare’s Senior Vice President, Global Programs.

This part one of a series of posts from Mr. Butler on his campaign visit to Andavadoaka in Madagascar. His second post was on how Madagascar is a biological marvel, but it faces grave threats.

Some may falsely think of Rare as solely an awareness-raising organization, but Rare is actually in the business of behavior change.

Rare create an enabling environment for behavior change to take place by marketing the changes needed, as well as providing the alternatives to make desired changes possible and sustainable.  In simplest terms, this means that Rare seeks ways to convince and enable individuals and communities to take action to protect endangered species and ecosystems. When Rare and its partners are successful, individuals and communities change their own behaviors so that conservation threats are reduced or eliminated.

Rare must evaluate its performance by measuring each Pride campaign’s ability to impact individual and community behaviors, so that conservation measures are supported, implemented, and ultimately lead to the elimination of threats to biodiversity.  These conservation measures include evaluating behavior change by determining, for example:

• The number of families to adopt a new fuel-efficient stove;
• The number of fishermen who adopt the use of nets, rather than dynamite;
• The acres of forest that people agree to protect.

These are the most common visible signs that a Pride campaign is making an impact and progressing towards its goal of conservation.  While these signs are critically important milestones in any Pride campaign to protect an endangered ecosystem, they may take months or even years to develop.  In response, Rare has developed success measures that can give an earlier indication of the likely success of a Pride campaign.  These indicators measure achievements that often occur during the organizing portion of a Pride campaign and offer some prediction of the long-term viability of a campaign. Rare measures its success by looking at three categories of measures:

• 1) Capacity
• 2) Constituency
• 3) Conservation

In addition, a “Theory of Change” is developed for each campaign to clarify the expected sequence of outcomes, and determine whether we are on track at each step.

Capacity

Capacity is a measure of a local partner’s ability and willingness to manage a social marketing campaign in the future.  One measure is the percentage of former campaign managers who have stayed in conservation.  Based on longitudinal studies, more than 95 percent of all people trained by Rare are still in conservation roles and nearly 100 percent continue to use the skills they learned from Pride.  Many Pride campaign managers are internationally recognized leaders.  For example, in 2006, Tisna Nando of Indonesia was recognized by Time magazine as one of five Asian “eco-heroes.”  Rare focuses on individual capacity – the capacity a campaign manager develops during the university phase of the Pride Program, as well as the capacity that this new training brings to his or her organization.

Constituency

Constituency is a measure of the local community’s commitment to conservation.  This year, estimates show that 1.3 million people will be touched by a Pride campaign.  Rare and its partners also track the number of volunteers who support a campaign and what that might mean for a community.  For example, Salvador Garcia Ruvalcaba organized over 2,000 volunteers to collect 16 tons of trash around a critical watershed in Manantlán, Mexico.  Through follow-up research, estimates show that over 2 million people have changed their attitude towards conservation due to a Pride campaign, which is a good leading indicator of future behavior change.

Conservation

Conservation is a Pride campaign’s actual impact on the environment. Our ultimate measure is the actual threat reduction of a campaign.  Another measure is the community’s change in knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP).  Each campaign manager should be able to begin measuring the conservation impacts of his or her work (such as area of forest conserved, threats measurably reduced) by the time he or she has completed Pride training. For example, Titus Letaapo, a campaign manager from Kenya, measured the number of forest fires that occurred in his district each year before and after his campaign. Prior to the campaign, there were 14; two years later, there were only five.

These categories, known as the “3 C’s,” form the three pillars that support Rare’s ability to not only measure the success of a Pride campaign but also to help predict the likelihood of continued success after the campaign has ended.  They also help determine if corrective actions are needed while a campaign is in progress, i.e. if the capacity objective is not being met.

A second important tool is a campaign’s “Theory of Change” (ToC).  A clearly articulated Theory of Change serves to create a commonly understood vision of a campaign’s long-term goals, how they will be reached, and what will be used to measure progress along the way. Producing a “ToC” is an iterative process which begins in the application stage of the Pride Program and which is continually re-worked throughout the planning phase and into implementation. The Theory of Change is represented using the following equation:

K + A + IC + BR → BC → TR → CR

Where:

• 1) Conservation Result (CR) — What biological target are we trying to conserve?
• 2) Threat Reduction (TR) — What are the main threats to our conservation target, and which can we reduce?
• 3) Behavior Change (BC) — What behaviors for which group(s) must change in order to reduce these threats?
• 4) Barrier Removal (BR) — What are the barriers to adoption of the new behavior we want to see, and how can we remove them?
• 5) IC (Interpersonal Communication) — What conversations are needed to encourage people to adopt the new behavior?
• 6) Attitude (A) — What attitudes must shift for these conversations to happen?
• 7) Knowledge (K) — What knowledge is needed to increase awareness and help shift these attitudes?

In other words, this equation represents Rare’s hypothesis of how Pride campaigns can help address critical biodiversity issues, namely that “an increase in knowledge plus a change in attitude resulting from interpersonal communication, in the presence of an appropriate[1] barrier removal ‘tool,’ lead to behavior change, which facilitates threat reduction and ultimately ensures conservation.”  For each step in the equation, Rare campaign managers establish “SMART” Objectives and metrics to track progress over, and beyond, the timeline of their campaigns.

An entire division within Rare (Quality Management & Improvement) has been established to work with Rare’s regional staff and project partners to help assess and evaluate the progress being made. Launched in March 2009, the Quality Management and Improvement Team’s mission is to:

Create and manage a set of processes and tools to ensure that Rare is running the most effective conservation projects possible and that Rare has a system to monitor and ensure success. The team will gather and use data, cases, best practices and other tools to improve Pride campaigns, and to improve the overall processes that support Pride.

One such tool is the undertaking of cross-regional campaign visits, with the goal of:

• Ground-truthing processes to check if there are gaps between what was planned to happen, what is actually happening, and what is purported to happen;
• Determining what could make campaigns better and feeding these lessons back into the Pride campaign design (including the formal curriculum);
• Compliance to ensure that there is no gap between reported information and actual results.

I was delighted to be part of the first cross-regional campaign visit, when I joined a team composed of Dale Galvin (COO), Daniel Hayden (Director of Quality Management and Improvement) and Annalisa Bianchessi (Pride Program Manager) on a visit to the Andavadoaka Coast in southwest Madagascar. The trip reviewed progress toward the 3 C’s (Capacity, Constituency, and Conservation) and this campaign’s Theory of Change [2]. I was excited to see the campaign for several reasons. First, it was a marine campaign, and would therefore help us with a suite of new campaigns Rare is proposing for next year (as many as 24 campaigns around the world with a marine theme).  Second, Madagascar was a place I had not visited before.

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[1] Economically viable, socially and culturally appropriate, as well as easily accessible and adoptable.

[2] Take a look at every Pride campaign featured on RarePlanet and you will be able to see its Theory of Change.

Paul Butler, Rare’s Vice President of Global Programs, sums up the seven final campaigns that graduated from Rare’s training center at the University of Kent in England. Paul also introduces us to Tublai Ililau of Palau who focused on the re-seeding various species of Giant Clams.

The seven graduating Pride campaign managers with Paul Butler, on the night of their presentations.

The evening was drawing to a close, the audience at the University of Kent in Canterbury had been enthralled by the stories of our seven campaign managers who had returned to finalize their reports and plot strategies for campaign follow up. The seven ladies came from the islands in the Caribbean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as Belize in Central America. We had heard stories of how they had overcome challenges to reach deep into their communities to change attitudes and practices; and had listened to songs, watched videos and been entertained by Olivia’s Stork Dance and Brooke’s butterfly fish mascot.

While each campaign manager talked passionately about their campaigns, they also spoke with pride about their homes, and as each began their presentations with slogans drawn from their tourism departments, there seemed to be a competition, as to whose was the more beautiful…… “It’s Better in the Bahamas”, “You Better Belize It”,   “Saint Lucia – Simply Beautiful”. One thing was for sure, most in the audience would rather had been in any one of the seven countries that they represented than in England on a cold, wet, dark evening!
 
Last up to talk about her conservation campaign was Tublai Ililau from Palau in the Pacific’s Micronesia. I can say, hand on heart, that after Saint Lucia (my adopted homeland), Palau has to rank as the most beautiful place on Earth – just take a look at the Rock Islands on this site and you’ll see why!

Beautiful Palau.

Rare has worked with Palau and the Palau Conservation Society for more than a decade and has had the pleasure of supporting three campaigns on that island. In fact, Tublai’s immediate supervisor, Yalap, Yalap, is a former campaign manager and his cousin was Noe was one too! So Tublai follows in a long line of local heros. Reflecting the magnificent marine environment of her homeland, Tublai’s campaign focused on promoting coastal conservation and the Giant Clam.

Tublai with her supervisor Yalap Yalap who ran a Pride campaign in 2001. Yalap was a part of the first groups of conservationists to undergo Pride training at Kent. 

Palau is home to seven of the nine species of Giant Clam, which like many marine species around the world have been over-harvested. Much of Tublai’s work focused around Melekeok, one of the nation’s 16 states. 

Tublai explained that in 1994 a Marine Protected Area had been established in that state, but it had little community recognition (few even knew of its existence), and regulations governing its protection were unenforced or unknown. Through Pride, and working with the Vice Speaker of the State Legislature, Tublai built community recognition for the site and support for its rigorous protection.  Due to Tublai’s efforts the tide has changed, and today fishermen vigorously support its existence to the extent that they have begun re-seeding  the area with young Giant Clams. First 700, and just prior to Tublai’s return a further 3,000 are planned to be seeded! The community hopes to establish an underwater trail so that people from all over the world can share in their pride and joy.

Tublai shows off some of her education materials about the various species of Giant Clams in the waters of Palau.

Tublai herself has plans to expand her campaign to other States in Micronesia and to build upon the foundation she has set. She said, “I never thought what we achieved would have been possible! It was great!!”

Students help spread the campaigns slogan of Tublai’s campaign and wear pins of the giant clam to show their support.

“It was great” not only summed up Tublai’s work, but also the work of all seven campaign managers – the final graduating class from Kent. Hard work, dedication and a recipe for success, that’s what it takes; and with the opening words from Cathleen’s introduction, the audience could clearly see that “Global conservation is indeed in local hands,” and very capable ones at that! 

Each of the seven campaign managers live in some of the most important, richest biodiversity sites on Earth — whether it is the marine environments of the Pacific or in the wetlands of Belize and they all are dedicated to protect them!

Cathleen from Mauritius says she’s fed up with people knowing her island only from the saying “as dead as Dodo,” and she plans to do everything in her power to ensure that is the last species to go extinct in her patch of paradise.

Paul Butler, Rare’s Vice President of Global Programs, blogs about Cheryl Calaustro who got the word out about her campaign via the media, appearing on a multitude of TV and radio programs. Cheryl lit up the TV screens in her native Guam talking about her Pride campaign and the endemic Guam Rail. Read more about her campaign!

Cheryl with the endemic Guam Rail, the flightless bird that her campaign focused on.

Cheryl Calaustro, from Guam, works with the Guam Department of Agriculture. Her Go Native, Protect Our Island of Guam” campaign focused on the Guam Rail, a flightless bird endemic to Guam. Guam is one of those classic examples of where an invasive species has devastated natural ecosystems and left the forests of the island silent.

Vince Stricherz, birding expert, writes, “Birds typically make up a small part of the life of a forest, but they are important for pollination, spreading seeds around the forest and controlling insects that feed on plants. Guam, an island 30 miles long and five to 15 miles wide about 3,800 miles west of Hawaii, lost most of its native birds after the brown tree snake was introduced by accident from the Admiralty Islands following World War II. The snake has few predators on Guam, so its population density is quite high — estimated at more than 3,000 per square mile — and some individuals there grow to an unusual size of 10 feet long. Before introduction of the brown tree snake, Guam had 12 species of native forest birds. Today 10 of those are extinct on Guam, and the other two species have fewer than 200 individuals. Though Guam has some non-native bird populations, few other birds moved in when native species died out, and none of them live in the forest. That leaves few birds to consume tree seeds and then drop them away from the trees”.

Guam, a small Island with vast forests and grassland.

Much work and considerable emphasis has been placed on the snake, and awareness levels on the island are high. In her pre-project survey, Cheryl found that 54 percent of respondents were aware of the threats posed by the Brown Tree Snake, but only 5 percent were aware that feral cats posed threats too. Cats are especially problematic for the flightless Guam Rail or Koko, which thanks to a successful captive breeding program escaped extinction and is the subject of a re-introduction program.

Koko, Cheryl’s mascot helped her get the word out about the endemic Guam Rail.
Few respondents knew about how they could help or about feline neutering (23 percent). Bringing awareness to this issue was to become the focus of Cheryl’s campaign. In addition to the usual Pride campaign collateral, Cheryl utilized the mass media. Her campaign appeared on 10 TV programs, four radio programs, and in the press frequently.

She spoke to more than 6,500 young people and even developed a Guam Rail facebook page to reach the island’s youth. She spoke excitedly about her program, but also noted that while knowledge and attitudes have indeed changed, the questionnaire survey results were not as high as she had hoped. She wondered if communities were receiving confused messages, as her campaign was running simultaneously with another Pride campaign. Cheryl showed a fabulous video of kids singing a song, that moved those listening to her presentation and concluded with the words that “success comes in all shapes and sizes, and is not always reflected in statistics”. Cheryl remains committed to building upon her work and will “keep on trying”….

Last up was Tublai from Palau – an island archipelago that ranks right up there on my personal list of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Paul Butler, Rare’s Vice President of Global Programs, introduces us to Brooke Nevitt — an environmental education and outreach coordinator who led a Pride campaign in the Northern Mariana Islands. Read about how Brooke networked with teachers, government agencies, and nonprofits alike to get coral reef education into school curriculum, and into the minds of students.

Brooke Nevitt brings hands on experience to corel reef education.

Brooke Nevitt from Saipan in the Pacific’s Northern Mariana Islands focused her presentation on the need for partnerships. Her campaign’s focus was on the island’s reef ecosystem and marine protected areas (MPAs). In her pre-project survey 50 percent of respondents did not know that Saipan had an MPA. This is pretty remarkable since this tiny island measures only seven miles by 14 miles actually has a total of three MPAs! She asked the question, “If people are unaware of something, how can they be expected to cherish and protect it?” Brooke needed to get the word out!

Brooke’s ”symbol of Pride” Primo  was embraced by children and adults all over the island.

Over the course of her two-year campaign, she reached out to several target audiences; but she focused her talk on her efforts to engage children, and through them, their parents. But even working with a “captive audience” of young students she faced barriers. How could coral reef education be incorporated into lesson plans when environmental education was not in the curriculum at all? How could she engage kids in conservation when teachers lacked the base knowledge to teach nature or about the marine ecosystem? How does one devise a classroom lesson about coral reefs when their true beauty can only be seen in the water?

Brooke’s answer was to foster partnerships and solicit the help of individuals and groups who could help her. The result was teachers training camps, where lesson plans about coral reef conservation were designed and eventually embedded into the national curriculum.

Children from Brooke’s community with a poster from her conservation campaign.

Through her partners she was able reach out to the community further. The Island’s Department of Environmental Quality and Coastal Management developed materials on reefs and reef ecosystems; MANI, a local NGO, funded teachers camps and student field trips. Teachers now get credits for attending the teachers camps and these credits accrue toward their professional development.

Beautiful CNMI.  Due to Brooke’s campaign, students will learn about the island’s marine ecosystems and the Marine Protected Areas.

Ten schools and 400 children were involved this year in a coral reef education program and this program is scheduled to expand next year. Brooke concluded that with partnerships in place, and enthusiastic support from the schools and Education Department, the scene is set for expansion. She hopes to continue with the campaign and expand it to neighboring Island, Rota, which was a site of an earlier Pride campaign that focused on the importance of Rota’s terrestrial ecosystem.

The symbol of Brooke’s campaign was the endemic Yellow-Crowned Butterfly Fish nick-named Primo. Her mascot visited during the presentation, much to the delight of the university audience.

Senior Vice President of Global Programs, Paul Butler, celebrates the success of Shelly Cant and her Pride campaign to protect the Pintail Duck in Big Pond, Bahamas. Read how Shelly rallied her community to take Pride in their environment.

Shelly Cant, Pride campaign manager in Big Pond, Bahamas

Shelly Cant, who ran her conservation campaign in the Bahamas, took the stage. She talked about the implementation process of the Pride campaign and gave specific details about her wetlands campaign. Shelley noted that the results of her pre-project questionnaire survey really surprised her.

She found that the people did know about the island’s wetlands and were supportive of greater protection being afforded to them (83 percent); but they did not know “how they could help” or what they could do! Shelly noted that this simple exercise in information-gathering had helped her to define her campaign. Had she gone on the assumption that the public knew little, then time and resources may have been wasted relaying the “knowledge” that people already had; rather than focusing on actions that people could take!

Some of the wetlands that Shelly and her Pride campaign are trying to protect.

The project planning also helped Shelly identify the most significant threats facing the islands’ wetlands – these include irresponsible and unplanned development, illegal dumping, and invasive species. Because dumping is illegal, Shelly found it difficult to identify the “who” that lay behind the threat and therefore target them specifically. She and her agency, the Bahamas National Trust, decided to focus on the communities that live around the wetlands and to foster a sense of Pride for the wetlands that lie on their doorstep. With this, they hoped that the community members would become more active in reporting illegal activities, as well as in activities like clean-up, reforestation, and the removal of invasive species.

The campaign focused on getting these communities to “adopt a wetland,” and used the endemic Bahamas Pintail Duck as its emblematic species. Shelly said, “people seem to find ducks cute, and this species is our own!”  By the time of her return to Kent, seven wetlands had been adopted, three corporations had come on board, and the campaign seemed to have taken on a life of its own.

 
Shelley worked with schools and did puppet shows about the Bahamas Pintail Duck and preserving and protecting the wetlands of the Bahamas.

Because of the Bahamas Pride campaign led by Shelly the community around Big Pond adopted their wetland and have begun cleaning it and replanting vegetation. The next step is to rehabilitate another key wetland site and reconnect it back to the sea, nearly a century after it was enclosed!

 

Senior Vice President of Global Programs, Paul Butler – the first Rare Pride campaign manager − takes a look at Olivia Carballo-Avilez’s Pride campaign in Belize. Initially facing apprehensive community members, Olivia’s persistence made a lasting conservation impact in the communities surrounding the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. Read how!

Olivia proudly shows off her poster of the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary and the posterchild of her campaign, the Jabiru Stork.

Olivia Carballo-Avilez works for the Belize Audubon Society and focused her campaign on the important wetland area of Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary and on the Jabiru Stork – the largest bird in Central America. Olivia spoke of the challenges of being a conservationist in areas where traditional values and behaviors do not always align with conservation goals of sustainable development. This is an area where people want (and need) economic development, as much as they do pristine resources. Olivia’s challenge was to use her campaign to encourage the area’s cattle farmers to pen their cattle and prevent them from straying into the wetland area where their dung raises nutrient levels in the water leading to algal blooms and eutrophication. Other wetland areas have been degraded by land clearing and over-grazing.

Initiating a culture of sustainable grazing was a goal of Olivia’s Pride campaign. She worked with farmers in the area, encouraging many to adopt sustainable practices. 

Olivia noted that while visiting the community early on in her campaign, she had her vehicle’s tires slashed and was left stranded in the village. While not common, I have seen this before. Several years ago a campaign manager in Indonesia had his life threatened, while another in the Philippines was run off the road by a logging truck. Conservation takes passion, commitment and guts!

Olivia went on to talk about more positive aspects, including some of the steps she took to try and change the hearts and minds of the residents around Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. Several times she took local village leaders on a flight over the wetland (their first time on a plane) so they could see the area they lived in and some of the environmental impacts affecting it. Many of her materials (posters, her Pride mascot, and her Pride song) were equally well received. She spoke of going into a house and seeing a poster proudly displayed in the living area, and of children mobbing her mascot, Jimbo Roo the Jabiru.

Her campaign promoted ten ways that cattle farmers could help and encouraged them to sign pledges to adopt these practices – and one third of the resident farmers did. These “early adopters” will hopefully pave the way for more as Olivia continues to work in the area on these issues. But, due to her efforts in the past two years, trust in conservationists rose from 25 percent (pre-survey) to 50 percent (post-survey). Olivia concluded her presentation saying that on her last visit to Crooked Tree she was welcomed with a hug and not a cutlass.

Jimbo Roo the Jabiru Stork was the mascot for Olivia’s campaign and a favorite among many in the community. Clicke here to see a video of Olivia and her mascot!
Click here to listen to Olivia’s Pride song about Jimbo Roo!

A highlight of Olivia’s presentation was her dancing in front of the audience to her song! It was magnificent! Next up to present was Shelly from the Bahamas…

Click here to view a multi-media slideshow of Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary Featuring photography from Jason Houston.

 

Rare’s Senior Vice President of Global Programs, Paul Butler, continues to blog about the most recent graduates of the Rare Pride program. Here he focuses on Feria Narcisse-Gaston of St. Lucia and the symbol of her Pride campaign, the Saint Lucia Iguana.

Feria in her native Saint Lucia, known to some as the “land where the iguanas are found.”

Much of the previous week had seen the seven graduating Pride campaign managers preparing for the evening’s graduation event. They had returned to the University of Kent at Canterbury in the UK from “the four corners of the earth” with samples of their Pride materials and data collected from their post-project surveys. Under the guidance of our Pride program managers, the materials were reviewed and then each campaign manager was given training on presentation techniques.

Cathleen, who led the Mauritius Pride campaign, competently kicked off the evening and introduced each graduating Pride campaign manager. She talked about how similar, yet diverse they all were. The seven come from three oceans — the Pacific: Palau, Guam and CNMI; the Atlantic/Caribbean: Saint Lucia and the Bahamas; and The Indian Ocean: Mauritius. And, with the exception of Olivia, they are all from islands. Olivia is from Belize – but with its small population, and being completely surrounded by Spanish-speaking territories, it is an island all the same, even if it’s not completely encircled by the sea. The returning students are also all women and all have faced challenges in reaching out to their communities.

The Pride campaign managers then presented their work. Each described one step in the campaign planning and implementation process, using their own work as an example, and drew upon the experience of the others as well.

First to present was Feria Narcisse-Gaston from Saint Lucia who stepped up to the podium and spoke about the planning phase, one of the first parts of the Pride campaign. Having spent half my life in Saint Lucia, where I served as Conservation Advisor to the Forestry Department, I was all too aware of the complexities around her site in the northwest part of the island.

Her campaign focused on the dry littoral woodlands and beaches around the regions of Grand Anse and Louvet. These seemingly desolate areas are “off the beaten track,” and difficult to access by road. Yet, they have attracted the eyes of developers for many decades. With their long sandy beaches they are also areas where legal and illegal sand mining take place. More importantly, they are also home to a rich array of unique biodiversity: the Saint Lucia Wren, the Semper’s Warbler; the Rufus Nightjar, White-breasted Thrasher and the Saint Lucia Blackfinch. The beaches are the principal nesting site of the magnificent Leatherback Turtle and linking the terrestrial and shore biomes is the Saint Lucia Iguana – a species that feeds in the dry woodland forest, but lays its eggs in the warm beach sand. It was this species that Feria had chosen as her flagship species. Listen to Feria’s campaign song about the Saint Lucia Iguana!

Feria Narcisse-Gaston works for the Forestry Department and introduced her site by talking of the cultural importance of the iguana. Hewanorra, Saint Lucia’s original name, means “land where the iguanas are found.” The island came upon this name because of the iguana’s abundance at the time of the arrival of Carib Indians. Today, the species is gravely endangered, clinging on in remote dry areas like Grand Anse.

The Saint Lucia Iguana, the symbol of Feria’s Pride campaign.

Feria’s pre-project survey showed that people living around the site were totally unaware of the threats facing the area and of the legal status afforded to the iguana. Her campaign would strive to build this awareness in the hope that people would then speak up when development is proposed and recognize the environmental and economic value of northwest Saint Lucia.

Feria talked of the materials she had produced: posters, costumes, songs, comics and bumper stickers and how awareness of her key messages has increased significantly. Understanding of threats has risen greatly and knowledge as to the legal status of the Saint Lucia Iguana and other protected wildlife increased from 48 percent (pre-project) to 81percent (post project). Along with her colleagues, Feria recognizes that changing knowledge and attitudes is only the first step in reducing threats and generating sustainable conservation results. The changed attitudes must now be harnessed and used to argue passionately for sustainable development that brings jobs to local people, and which protects the land for water, wood, and wildlife, and not simply for the few who can afford a beach-side condominium.

Feria’s mascot greets children in Saint Lucia.

Feria’s presentation and the photos of her site, reminded me just how much I miss Saint Lucia. Next up was Olivia from Belize…
 

Rare’s Senior Vice President of Global Programs, Paul Butler, blogs about the last seven Pride campaign managers to receive their training at the University of Kent in England, Rare’s first training site. Paul reflects on the array of conservation campaigns that this institution has helped produce, as well as the origins of Rare’s Kent program which is permanently transitioning to Georgetown University in Washington. D.C.

The final seven Prirde campaign managers to graduate from the University of Kent. They are, Olivia Carballo-Avilez, Belize (top insert); Feria Narcisse-Gaston, St. Lucia (bottom insert); Cheryl Calaustro, Guam (standing, far left); Tublai Ililau, Palau; Shelley Cant, Bahamas; Cathleen Cybele, Republic of Mauritius; and Brooke Nevitt, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.


“Global Conservation is in Local Hands” was the theme of a graduation presentation that I attended Thursday, May 14th at the University of Kent in Canterbury, about six miles from where I live in the UK. It had been a long and busy day, putting together a talk that I’m giving at the International Parrot Convention later this month, while preparing an assessment to “evaluate” the on-going work of thirty campaigns that are active in the field, as well as trying to complete my half-yearly personal assessment plan, and respond to a cascade of emails. By the time 6 p.m. rolled around I’ll admit I was pretty tired; but that day was a special day and one that I literally had looked forward to all year long.

It is a time when a group of campaign managers return to their university to talk about the progress they are making toward their conservation goals, and about high and low points of their campaigns. Watching young people talk with passion and commitment about their sites and the complex issues they face always makes me proud to work for Rare and I feel privileged and fortunate to find myself in this job. That day was no exception. Indeed I was doubly excited as we had not one but two different groups of conservationists returning.

The event also represented a passing of an era, as it is the last time that we will run our program through the University of Kent, as we shift our English-language training center to Georgetown University in Washington D.C. – a stone’s throw away from Rare’s office in Arlington, Virginia. Having set up the Kent program back in 2001, there was certain poignancy about the occasion — watching the UKC lecture staff (Ian Bride, Bob Smith and others) who played such a key role in developing the initial curriculum, reflect on the fact that this is the last group of Rare Pride campaign managers that they are directly involved with.

In 2001, Paul signs the MOU with Kent University. Rare’s Pride English Program was housed at Kent until 2009. The training program at the University of Kent has produced 47 Pride campaigns.


The first conservationists to be trained at Kent, along with Rare staff and Kent staff. Paul Butler is center.

It was a time to reflect on the 47 students that have passed through the doors at Kent. Campaign managers from countries as far as the fields of South Africa, Sierre Leone, Mauritius, Seychelles and Kenya in Africa; to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), Fiji, Palau, Guam, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, and Samoa in the Pacific; to China, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia and the Philippines in Asia, not to mention Belize and multiple islands throughout the Caribbean. With an 85 percent graduation rate and many managers being given “distinction” for their studies we can all be justly proud of the relationship that has served our respective institutions well, as it has conservation. Past campaign managers can reflect on protected areas they have established (in Fiji, Indonesia, Palau, and the Philippines to name a few) and behaviors changed, as well as the fact that the majority have continued in their conservation careers.

The evening began with a poster session and an opportunity for the audience to walk around and see materials produced by the seven campaigns that were presenting that evening. Posters, t-shirts, bags, bumper stickers, songs and costumes were displayed, while our Pride campaign managers shared their stories.

Cathleen shows off some of her campaign materials.

Rare staff included Sean Southey, Vice President of the Pride English Program; Ariela Rosenstein, Rare’s Training Manager; Adam Murray and Annalisa Bianchessi who are both Pride Program Managers or mentors to the conservationists; as well as Duncan Thomas and Lisa Matusiak who had been working with the campaign managers  to help them  analyze campaign results, craft their final reports and prepare for the evening. We were joined by Rosemary Godfrey who left Rare last year after playing a pivotal role in developing the Kent program, and was its first Pride Program Manager. We all filed into the lecture hall took our seats and were welcomed by Sean who set the scene talking about Rare, Rare Pride, and the returning conservationists who had completed their Pride campaigns: Cathleen Cybele (Mauritius); Shelly Cant (Bahamas); Olivia Carballo-Avilez (Belize); Feria Narcisse-Gaston (Saint Lucia); Brooke Nevitt (CNMI); Cheryl Calaustro (Guam) and Tublai Ililau (Palau). Sean talked passionately about the seven women and their work; then the lights dimmed, the screen lit up and Cathleen took the stage…