Flagstaff Kestrel Project (FKP) seeks to understand best practices of integrating community participants into conservation.
Understanding that collective action is the change-making force with the greatest potential, FKP uses community organizing tactics to study the intersection between community organizing and involvement with conservation. I hope to determine best practices for involving communities into conservation, using the organizing strategies of power mapping, building relational power, and interconnecting community, among other strategies.
FKP uses an American Kestrel nestbox monitoring program as the context for studying the intersection between community organizing and conservation. I built connections between dozens of community partners; worked with partners to acquire supplies, workspace, and nest sites; had relational meetings with interested undergraduates to build an intern team; provided educational events; hosted community workshop nestbox building days; crowdsourced funding and wrote grants; solicited volunteers for nestbox installations; and built monitoring teams using community members.
FKP uses American Kestrels as a charismatic entry point to interest laypeople in conservation. I chose to use an American Kestrel nestbox monitoring project as the background for this work because monitoring protocol, nestbox blueprints, and project tools are readily available through the American Kestrel Partnership, a project headed by the Peregrine Fund.
Questions:
Does involvement with FKP encourage participants to become involved further with conservation?
Does an intergenerational team model increase participants’ likelihood of becoming involved in conservation?
Generally, were FKP’s organizing strategies successful?
Methods:
- Organize FKP using community organizing strategy.
- Form a team of confident, strong community leaders (undergraduate interns) to faciliate project work.
- Administer surveys and interviews to project participants before and after an American Kestrel nestbox monitoring season.
- Form 3-person monitoring teams based on an intergenerational model; ½ of monitoring teams intergenerational, ½ of teams are control.
- Administer surveys and interviews after the monitoring season.
- Analyze data to determine FKP’s impact on participants, community, and kestrels.
- Assess “success” in context of numbers of volunteers, educational impact, new connections between organizations, and impact on individuals.
Results/Conclusions
Surveying and interviewing participants will occur in March 2020 and August 2020. Results will be available then. For now, the following has preliminarily proven to be true:
- Using community organizing methodology facilitated the coordination of FKP.
- Using community organizing strategies increases the relational power between FKP participants.
- Using organizing strategy increases community buy-in for this work.
- Using community organizing strategy increases community interconnection, and mobilizes laypeople to become involved in conservation.