youth for biodiversity conservation
January 26th, 2012 § 2 Comments
Been having way too much fun as the Blue Ventures Education and Outreach Coordinator!
Thanks to our partnership with UNICEF, a lot of my job involves teaching kids about conservation through a variety of innovative ways:
learning to make art from "beach rubbish"
…through Saturday Schools, where in- and out-of-school children get hands-on environmental education every weekend;
learning to interact with the internet for the first time...
…through Connecting Classrooms, where kids learn to think about their culture and their environment, and learn to share that they’ve learned via the internet on www.ConnectingClassrooms.net;
filming a film being filmed... Jon Slayer films Hery (JRC) filming Roger (president of Velondriake Mgmt Committee) on field trip with Connecting Classrooms
…and through the Junior Reporters Club, where I help young people to learn to use film to share news and stories about local conservation with their peers.
Recently we had a filmmaker come here to Andavadoaka to document the scope of our youth conservation activities, Jon Slayer. His films are nearly ready for a big roll-out with UNICEF… they will form the core of the newest Blue Ventures online endeavor, LiveWithTheSea.org, where youth and communities will share information, strategies, and best practices about marine and coastal conservation. Live With The Sea is also being made possible by a UNICEF grant.
In the meantime, I put together a film documenting a piece of Jon’s process of documenting the UNICEF youth conservation initiatives at Blue Ventures, especially Connecting Classrooms and the Junior Reporters’ Club (with members learning to document local conservation issues in a manner that inspires their peers) … In a sense, the lens behind the lens behind the lens.
Without a doubt, these kids are the future of the Velondriake locally-managed marine reserves… and an inspiration to my colleagues and me!
Click here to check out our beautiful new CCCYBC website, and to watch this and many other films from our program!.
Atsika: conservation, education, sustainable development
January 5th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
After years of collaboration on the ground, as Peace Corps Volunteers and beyond, Julia and I have finally reached our goal:
Atsika is officially a 501(c)3 non-profit organization!
Through Atsika, which means “we” or “us” in the dialect of northwest Madagascar, Julia and I will continue to work with a growing network of partners to support conservation, education, and sustainable development in the Ankarana region. The region is famous for its karst limestone “tsingy” massifs (known as “harana” in the local language), and for the unique Ankarana culture, where caves are sacred, taboos are deeply embedded, and a prince still influences the community as much as or more than the local government.
This is also the magical region that brought us all together — myself, Julia, Amido, Fidele, Andrew, Ian, Lisa, Alex, and countless others — from backgrounds in development, anthropology, agriculture, biology, and more — from America, Canada, the UK, and Madagascar. You can read more about our extended family in the latest edition of Anthropology News, in the article Good Neighbors.
My time in the Ankarana began in 2004, Andrew’s long before that, Julia’s just a few years after. Our work with the community has spanned a number of sustainable development projects, from a solar-powered community radio station to a schoolbook donation project with Oceane Aventures and CorsairFly. Since 2007, we have been working to help establish community-based natural resource management and conservation in the Ankarana, notably through helping to establish KOFAMA, the first local natural resource management association of its kind in the northwest.
Edward must be a young man by now. He will grow up with KOFAMA, and community-based natural resource management, as the norm
Click here to read more about the history of KOFAMA.
Atsika will be formally working with KOFAMA to support its local conservation and ecotourism activities, including guide training, small business management training, and environmental education. Importantly, our activities will also include support for primary education and literacy throughout the community, because improving access to education is crucial to ensuring sustainable long-term management of the local natural resource base.
Atsika is also planning the construction of an environmental resource center. We envision this center as a base of operations for Atsika in the Ankarana, an office and classroom for KOFAMA activities, a base for our key partner university overseas studies program (the University of Western OntarioMadagascar Environmental Anthropology field course, now in our 5th year of partnership), as well as a visitors’ center for ecotourists. Dreaming big: hoping to begin construction in 2012!
In addition, Atsika activities will support the local artisans’ association that Julia and I developed, l’Artisanat de l’Ankarana. You can read the story of the artisans here, and if you’re in Rhode Island you can even purchase their crafts at Midnight Sun! Enabling local artisans to access the ecotourist market in the Ankarana is an important step to ensuring that they derive direct economic benefits from ecotourism, allowing them to see the advantages of sustainable natural resource use and conservation as an alternative to traditional destructive resource use practices.
first visit to the caves, early stages of KOFAMA, 2007
Last but not least, Atsika will take on the task of finishing construction of our Analasatrana community school, the product of three years of generous donations from private sponsors in the UK, who, just like Julia and I, fell head over heels for the Ankarana and saw the need to support access to education. The school is nearly finished, teachers ready to teach, students ready to attend classes. Analasatrana is a small village within the southern Ankarana region with no school of its own. Those children able to study do so in other villages in overcrowded schools, while most are not able to study at all… until now! Through Atsika, our generous donors will be able to formally continue to support the school, and the Ankarana community can hope to open more schools in the near future, aiming for a 100% primary school attendance rate for local children.
some of the students in Analasatrana... excited for school!
We are thrilled to have made it here on our journey… here’s to a fantastic 2012 for the Ankarana community, and for Atsika!
Check out the previous blog entry for more information on Atsika… or check out our new websites!
