Later this summer, Partners for Conservation will be convening a couple of invitation-only learning opportunities focused on the “people” part of collaborative conservation and public-private partnerships. Attendees will come from a number of landscapes across the West where people are engaged in public-private conservation partnerships. The group assembled to deliver the session, as well as the invited participants, will represent a broad range of agency, landowner, and nonprofit organization perspectives. The landscapes represented will include a broad range of western geographies.
As Partners for Conservation has learned over the last 10 years, successful and sustainable conservation partnerships share certain attributes no matter where you go in the country. This was further evidenced in the Collaborative Conservation report released by Partners for Conservation this year, resulting from conversations with individuals engaged in conservation partnerships at many geographic scales across 11 western states. The goal of these sessions is to transfer basic principles and lessons-learned regarding interpersonal communication, relationships, and partnerships among people with diverse perspectives, all of which form the foundation of large-scale conservation partnerships.
Partners for Conservation anticipates learning a lot from these sessions as well, specifically the types of support that would be most helpful for individuals of all perspectives who are putting in the blood, sweat, and tears every day to make public-private conservation partnerships work. Given what PFC has learned from ten years of Private Lands Partners Day gatherings across the country, it is a foregone conclusion that whatever we learn here will be helpful in our efforts to support public-private partnerships that sustain working landscapes.
