I always thought the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was bubbling with pristine water to be able to reflect its surroundings so beautifully. Then, a few years ago when D.C. overnight shipped ducks from a massive die off in the pool via private jet to Madison’s USGS, I started to question this belief of mine. Seeing the pool in person, I now thoroughly understand the context. This story parallel’s well with my wide-eyed view that conservation organizations have it all figured out. Although still in amazement with the work of CI, with more information, I am now able to identify potential flaws and areas for improvement.

Refining Deliverables

Throughout five years in the research field and many more taking classes, I always had the same question, “So what?” This placement is finally answering my question, as I see how all the information I have jammed in my head over the years is applied in the world to make change. It has been an invaluable experience to not only witness the utilization of tools learned in the EC master’s program in conservation practice, but also to identify where the gaps still exist and how some tools may need to be adapted in different spaces.

Up until this point in my placement, I have been doing a lot of background research and surveying of Conservation International (CI) staff to identify major needs when engaging with strategic planning frameworks, like the Open Standards (OS). CI has a few specific needs to reach greater cohesion of strategic planning efforts:

1. One central location where all strategic planning/ OS resources are housed and organized for efficient utilization by field teams when writing proposals. 
2. More simplified templates for strategy and results chain creation that field teams can follow and reference after OS training.
3. Resources/ tools that help CI field teams engage with local communities in project planning for more effective and sustainable outcomes. 
4. Examples of quality strategic plans and results chains for field teams to reference when creating their proposal.

These will be the guiding ideas embodied in the key outputs of my placement. I am currently working to outline the website that will serve as the hub of strategic planning resources. While mapping this out, I am gathering resources that currently exist and reviewing them to better organize and label the website for most efficient use. In addition, I am using my experience with OS along with my supervisor’s experience applying OS in the field to develop a few template tools to help field teams efficiently utilize strategic planning. Finally, I have just started engaging with the human rights team at CI to gather information and map out a way we could incorporate a community engagement aspect into CI’s strategic planning. With just 5 short weeks left of my placement these tasks should take me through to the end, along with reviewing field team results chains as they are submitted to headquarters. 

Reflection

Determining what resources will be most useful to CI has been a longer process than I expected. I am not as far on deliverables as I thought I would be at this point, but if there’s one thing I learned in school, it’s that you can’t save the world in 8 weeks. Having to gather information and documents from many busy people has proven to be a process, with new hidden resources appearing daily through various connections. This has led me to reflect on the strong need for teams to have a solid organization mechanism, especially in such a large organization like CI with people all over the world working on the same projects. As I ask around for project proposals and heavily utilized resources, I am realizing that this is a common request. In addition, there are many incidences of duplicating work because people simply don’t know what tools CI has already created and the tools that have been created are rarely used. There needs to be a more efficient way for resource sharing and hopefully the website I build can serve as this tool. There is so much potential for learning from others expertise and experiences to make conservation projects continually progress in a positive direction. This is an idea touched on in our readings and discussions in Rob’s class last semester and I better understand how much further we could progress in conservation if we had easy access to build on what has already been done and learn from previous efforts.

In addition, getting a sense for the vision my supervisors have regarding strategy and results chain tools has been a learning curve for template production. I started by creating templates that closely follow OS and other strategic planning frameworks, but this does not seem to be the most useful for field teams. Although I realize that frameworks are just that and conservation in practice cannot always be as thorough as in theory, this experience has provided good context for potential limitations to complete strategic planning. This information will undoubtedly guide my conservation practice in the future. Although tools like OS and various monitoring and evaluation frameworks are a useful foundation for my work, I will need to be flexible to understand the capacity, resources, and needs of field teams in practical project design. One thing I have learned at CI is that many terms such as strategy, objective, and outcome have different meanings to different field teams. Although frameworks like OS aim to make language uniform, it seems in practice that creating visuals, simplified tools, and guiding questions may be a more effective way to get teams to a desired endpoint than to teach them a new system when they do not have the ability to all go through OS training. I do not know in what capacity I will work with on-the-ground conservation projects in the future, but to gather the general needs and gaps perceived by 16 CI field teams has been informative to me, having never had the opportunity to work directly on employing the strategies of a conservation project. 

A final point of reflection for me has been around the topic of stakeholder and community engagement. In our learning for the past year, we have discussed multiple times the need to engage local knowledge, community members, and key stakeholders in the conservation process to make our efforts most effective and sustainable. How one does that though is the impossible question that my supervisors have tasked me with looking into. This is a common point of uncertainty for field teams as they engage in strategic planning. At what point does one engage the community in the strategic planning process and to what extent? What do these engagements look like? I recently met with the human rights specialists at CI to get a sense for how I might go about helping answer these questions and incorporate community engagement into CI’s strategic planning process. I learned that these specialists are seldom actually involved in project planning and serve more as a resource to be reached out to with questions, as I had. They were excited by the idea of incorporating an aspect of community engagement into CI’s project planning to have more of an accountability mechanism in place. This was shocking to me that as a global organization with so much expertise in one place, that there wasn’t more collaboration occurring to ensure projects were properly engaging communities. One challenge they noted is that often field teams think putting effort into community engagement is taking money from conservation. In reality, this practice saves money and enhances positive impacts in the long run. 

Some key takeaways I gathered from the meeting include:

• Communities should be engaged early and often to understand their needs, but trust needs to be built with the community for proposing anything;
• A project needs to choose activities and outputs that the community can self-sustain in the future;
• Communities need to be involved in the design process, so they understand the project and feel ownership;
• Community champions/ well respected leaders can make a difference if involved in project;
• Project teams need to understand who the marginalized people are and have a separate integrated process to make sure their opinions are incorporated, even if this means bringing the project to their homes.

These are also useful tips to keep in mind as I move forward in my conservation career. They may seem like obvious important points, but I have come to realize that there are so many factors and pressures on field teams as they create project proposals, that having tools as a reminder of important considerations are incredibly useful to stay on track. Hopefully the resource hub I initiate can guide field teams through these important reminders when designing conservation projects. 

Life Reflections

In the non-professional aspect of my life, I have realized that joining a running team that does half marathons on the weekend is the most exhausting way to make friends in a new city. We’ll see how long this lasts.