Community Partnerships and Multi-Generational Gathering
Personnel from our partnering land management agency City of Albuquerque Open Space leading Yerba Mansa Project field crew members into the restoration site
Yerba Mansa Project
Parterning with local historical museum Gutierrez Hubbell House to create an exhibit on local medicinal plant traditions (co-curated by YMP Director Dara Saville and Herbalist Dianne Rand)
Yerba Mansa Project
Patnering with local schools to bring students into the Rio Grande Bosque for field classes
Yerba Mansa Project
Yerba Mansa Project events are designed to include all-ages for multi-generational events
Yerba Mansa Project
The success of the Yerba Mansa Project relies on community-building. This includes supportive and collaborative relationships with a variety of institutions including public libraries, government land management agencies, environmental- or conservation-oriented non-profits, area schools, or local businesses that share our values and mission. These mutually beneficial partnerships provide critical donations and financial support, new ideas and expertise, legal coverage for events, and also bring different people together who may have a variety of interests and connections. For example, local schools need to meet curriculum requirements in various subject areas and can accomplish that by participating in educational events that also further advance the goals of your programs. Land management agencies may provide support and benefit from invasive species control on their properties. Such partnerships may even be required as in the case of working on public lands. Additional opportunities for community-building come through offering events that are accessible and of interest to all ages. Reaching out to families with children lays the foundation for advancement of your program’s mission into the future while designing activities that encourage participation from elders incorporates their knowledge and experience.
Community support and participation are increased when activities are of interest and provide meaning to a variety of people, align with the goals of other like-minded organizations, and are widely accessible. In other words, programs should reflect something that unites the community. In the case of YMP, our riparian habitat is beloved for many different reasons by many different people and embodies our shared values of land and culture. Our events are all-inclusive providing roles for people with physical limitations or hands-on activities to engage children.
As we offered more co-sponsored events attracting a wider variety of people, we learned how to make our events more accessible. Restoration field work can be very physically demanding and tiring. In order to incorporate elderly folks and others with physical limitations we designed low-impact activities. For example, some people were more able to participate when offered a job of working with an assistant to simply clip seed heads of invasive species and put them in a bag while sitting in a shady area. Alternately, for field classes offered to our youngest students, we developed additional sensory-based and hands-on activities to accommodate more active bodies.
The pandemic presented an opportunity to make educational events more accessible, too. By offering free online classes via Zoom we enabled safe participation during a contagious outbreak and also provided access for people living in remote rural areas or other states. We adapted classes to include photographic slideshows for discussions on plant identification and uses. We also did demonstrations on how to prepare herbal remedies and wild foods in a cooking-show format.
Education, awareness, and traditional knowledge documentation
Local Community children's education
Karim Omar
Local Community children's awarness
Karim Omar
Training Stakeholders
Karim Omar
Training Stakeholders 2
Karim Omar
Education for children's
Karim Omar
Over the past 10 years, we have focused on assessing the conservation status of endemic species and their rehabilitation in the wild. We have made a great effort to preserve it and plan for its sustainability. The most important thing that my team and I reached is that the surrounding community, users of resources, researchers, and decision-makers, whether in the site or in the government away from the place, the private sector, and students even the public can destroy everything we built during the previous years as a result of their ignorance of what we work and its importance to us and them. Dissemination of information is an external protection shield to ensure the sustainability of activities on the site. Continuous training and awareness activities should be in the target area and throughout the country in order to avoid destruction due to ignorance. Also, not documenting the traditional knowledge inherited by the local community is extremely dangerous and its loss is a waste of wealth that will cost the state and the world huge sums to discover again.
Education, awareness, and documentation, could reduce the current and future pressures and reduce the impact and the cost of recovery.
The most important factor for the success of training and awareness programs is the appropriate choice of the recipient, who preferably has contact, whether from close or from afar, with the natural resource.
Involving the community in planning and implementing conservation programs and agreeing on the sustainability and conservation of the natural resource consolidates the principle of partnership and trust and facilitates the process of documenting their knowledge.
Share with the community all your next steps and challenges and hear from them their opinions and suggestions, even if they are simple from your point of view.
Teach children in the region to understand the next generation.
Follow-up and engagement of trainees after training and awareness is very useful and works to establish and implant information within them.
Educate stakeholders about the importance of your role for their future and share the decision with them.
Involvement of Local Community in conservation Planning
Community Involvement
Karim Omar
Community Involvement 2
Karim Omar
Community Involvement 3
Karim Omar
The local communities that are located inside Protected Area suffer from some restrictions on the use of natural resources, which they believe are their property and right, and that they are the people of the place before the establishment of the PA. Usually, restrictions on the use of natural resources are for the purpose of protection and reducing pressures, which may affect the livelihood of some members of the local community, which they consider a process of denial of their rights. The local community owns cultural wealth that has been passed down from generation to generation on the optimal use of resources, their protection, and their propagation in simple ways. Involving that community in planning processes to protect natural resources will remove many of the penalties, whether for the management of the PA or for the community itself. Traditional knowledge is a hidden treasure that can be used to improve the state of natural resources and enhance the local community's sense of ownership and importance in protecting its resources, which will support the sustainability process and reduce disturbances
Those in charge of the selection process should map the community’s priorities in this area and points of contention, and identify influential community leaders, heard and loved by their community.
Several initial meetings should be held with community leaders, discussing them and asking for their support to mobilize community participation.
We should go to them in their areas and hold community assembly meetings to elect local representatives to coordinate conservation program activities
We learned that the local community and its traditional knowledge is a scientific wealth that should never be wasted.
The process of selecting representatives of the local community should be considered carefully, taking into account the conflict between tribes and avoiding the involvement of two dissenting parties.
Alternative opportunities must be provided when the community is prevented from some of its activities for the purpose of conservation
They should be made aware that they have the power to decide and allow communities to prioritize and select quick-impact projects to strengthen support and stimulate local participation.
