I can’t believe our first year as Conservation Nation is over! It seemed like both the fastest and the most meaningful year of my career at the same time.

The year started with equal parts anxiety and confidence over our new direction as an organization determined to lift barriers to bring a stronger, more diverse, and more representative community of wildlife champions and conservationists to the fight to preserve biodiversity and our planet. We were confident that this was an enormous need and had huge potential to make a meaningful impact for wildlife and equity but anxious about whether this small band of us could do justice to this critical mission. Turns out we could!

I’m so incredibly proud of what the team accomplished. In our first year we:

Created two Conservation Nation Fellows: Thanks to wonderful supporters, we were able to fund Taylor Rabe out at Yellowstone (more on Taylor below) and, thanks to our friends at Catmosphere, we brought on a second fellow, Yamat Lengai, who is a Maasai wildlife conservationist and will begin her fellowship with a focus on minimizing human/wildlife conflict with big cats in Tanzania. 

Provided grants and support to an additional 23 wildlife conservationists working around the globe to save threatened animals and inspire a more inclusive and representative next generation of conservationists. One of these grantees is Kassandra Townsend who is bridging the gap between Western science and Indigenous knowledge. She hopes to study how three owl species in southeastern Arizona utilize their habitat and how climate change affects their ecosystem.

Successfully launched a pilot of the Conservation Nation Academy in two tuition-free schools in Washington, D.C. and, armed with the measurement and evaluation work from the pilot, created an optimized Conservation Nation Academy program to roll out to additional schools next year, including a module on ‘belonging in nature’ that showcases amazing role model conservationists to inspire and build confidence.

Launched our first three-year Conservation Nation Collective, thanks to our Chairs Doro Bush Koch and Dawn Arnall, with dedicated support to save elephants and rhinos in east Africa and support the work of local women in the conservation fight. 

But what really struck me with overwhelming pride was a moment last week when our Year One impact came to life in a very real way at the Washington School for Girls. Taylor Rabe had finished her presentation where she inspired the girls with incredible stories of the wolves of Yellowstone and brought to life the exact mission Conservation Nation is working for: She was raised by her grandmother in an underserved neighborhood in Ohio, devoted herself to helping wildlife, worked 80 hours a week for two long years between a volunteer job to break into the Yellowstone Wolf Project and a paying job to cover the bills, and how Conservation Nation changed her life and made her dream a reality of a paying job at the Yellowstone Wolf Project. In the video below, you can see the warmth and pride on Taylor’s face in the middle, the energy on the girls’ faces, and the 3D wolf skull Taylor brought with her that another Conservation Nation grantee, Maddy Jackson, made. It was, truly, a physical embodiment in one moment of everything we had hoped to accomplish and more in our first year.