Workshop

Title: Catalyzing and Involving Rural Communities in Protecting Their Natural Resources and Biodiversity

Organizer: 
Robert H. Horwich, Director, Community Conservation 
Jon Lyon, Merrimack College

PowerPoint Presentations:
CC Belize India
NCSE CC vs. ICDP
NCSE Workshop Introduction

Session Goals:
To give preliminary training and insights on motivating rural communities in biodiversity protection to activist conservationists working with communities

Summary:
Community Conservation has developed a course on catalyzing community conservation projects based on almost 25 years of carrying out successful community projects in 11 countries.  The course includes lectures interspersed with discussion and hands-on activities (see www.communityconservation.org). The course, which introduces participants to community conservation projects and steps to catalyze them, also discusses 27 benchmarks as important objectives for a successful community conservation project, and major differences between small-scale community conservation projects and large integrated conservation and development projects. Examples from Belize, the United States, and India point out how small projects working at the community level can effect regional change from the bottom up. It provides the rudiments for how to initiate, carry out, monitor, and terminate one's role in a successful community conservation project.   While often some of the ideas that have worked are simple, others are often paradoxical and seemingly counterintuitive.
Although this course has been carried out as a longer 1-3 day workshop, for the National Council for Science and the Environment Conference workshop, we will provide a short introduction that will give participants a “taste” of how to catalyze successful community conservation projects and how to motivate rural communities to participate as full partners in the conservation process.  While we hope the workshop will be of interest to activist conservationists, it is important for a larger audience to know what successes are possible.  Therefore, we would like to share this information and introduce activists, practitioners and academics looking for conservation solutions to concepts, philosophies, ideas and practices that have led to practical field conservation successes.
The workshop will be a series of short lectures and group exercises led and coordinated by Rob Horwich and Jon Lyon.  We hope participants will get from the workshop a sense of what is possible and how effective community conservation projects can be to protect our forests, oceans and wildlife. In turn we hope participants will share these concepts with others.

Location:

Conservation International
2011 Crystal Drive, Suite 500
Arlington, VA 22202

Additonal Resources:
Community Conservation Descriptive Letter
How to Catalyze Successful Community Conservation Projects
Community Conservation: Practitioners' Answers to Critics
Robert Horwich CV