One of many extra revolutionary inter-organizational conservation partnerships of current years is getting into a brand new part. Ten years in the past this October, employees from the Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation approached an rising group of personal landowners targeted on public-private partnerships with a tantalizing proposal. The landowners working solely as volunteers had included a brand new group, Companions for Conservation (now Partnerscapes), to work on the communication and partnership-building elements of sustaining working landscapes. The Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation was looking for to interact the broader human and pure landscapes containing wildlife refuges and proposed to help within the improvement of Companions for Conservation by underwriting an government director for the fledging group.
What adopted was relationship constructing between the refuge affiliation and the board of the landowner group which led to the hiring of the primary Companions for Conservation government director, Steve Jester, as an worker of the Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation in Could 2013. Nearly precisely 10 years after these first conversations the employment relationship is about to finish and Partnerscapes is efficiently transferring into the longer term.
In 2016, Companions for Conservation’s annual gathering, Non-public Lands Companions Day, was held within the Everglades headwaters, a panorama of maximum significance to the Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation, highlighting the excessive degree of public-private partnership supporting a working panorama which in flip was supporting one of many latest models of the nationwide wildlife refuge system. By 2017, Companions for Conservation was paying its personal manner together with for its government director Steve Jester, who nonetheless remained an worker of the refuge affiliation.
“The Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation took an important leap of religion with us, backed with actual {dollars}, and nice endurance,” mentioned founding Partnerscapes Chairman Jim Stone, “I don’t know the way lengthy it could have taken us to get the place we’re with out them, and for that, we will probably be without end grateful.
“Partnerscapes has grow to be a constant, and albeit obligatory, landowner voice for public-private conservation partnerships key to supporting landscapes that embody our nationwide wildlife refuges,” mentioned Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation President Geoffrey L. Haskett “we’re wanting ahead to the following chapter on this partnership story”.
