Congratulations To Partnerscapes On Their Subsequent Chapter! — The Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation

One of many extra revolutionary inter-organizational conservation partnerships of latest years is coming into a brand new section.  Ten years in the past this October, workers from the Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation approached an rising group of personal landowners centered on public-private partnerships with a tantalizing proposal.  The landowners working solely as volunteers had integrated a brand new group, Companions for Conservation (now Partnerscapes), to work on the communication and partnership-building facets of sustaining working landscapes.  The Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation was searching 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 Might 2013.  Virtually precisely 10 years after these first conversations the employment relationship is ready to finish and Partnerscapes is efficiently transferring into the longer term.

In 2016, Companions for Conservation’s annual gathering, Personal 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 items of the nationwide wildlife refuge system. By 2017, Companions for Conservation was paying its personal method together with for its government director Steve Jester, who nonetheless remained an worker of the refuge affiliation. 

“The Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation took an incredible leap of religion with us, backed with actual {dollars}, and nice persistence,” stated founding Partnerscapes Chairman Jim Stone, “I don’t understand how lengthy it could have taken us to get the place we’re with out them, and for that, we will probably be eternally grateful. 

“Partnerscapes has develop into a constant, and admittedly needed, landowner voice for public-private conservation partnerships key to supporting landscapes that embody our nationwide wildlife refuges,” stated Nationwide Wildlife Refuge Affiliation President Geoffrey L.  Haskett “we’re trying ahead to the following chapter on this partnership story”.