I've been an animal and nature lover for as long as I can remember. My career as an environmentalist was probably sparked back in kindergarten when I fell in love with my elementary school mascot, the West Indian manatee. I was appalled when I learned that this gentle, “cuddly” creature was threatened with human-caused extinction.  Fast forward a few years to the third grade... My class was learning about the Amazon rainforest. I was enthralled, imagining trees taller than any I had ever seen, flowers and birds of every color and monkeys, sloths, and jaguars swinging, crawling, and prowling through the rich foliage. I remember my class making a diorama of the different habitats of the Amazonian ecosystem and populating it with clay animal figurines (mine was an Amazonian manatee… naturally). Unfortunately, one cannot justly talk about the rainforest without also talking about its destruction, and my teacher was not remiss. She read us The Great Kapok Tree--a story Illuminating the ecological and spiritual impacts of rainforest destruction. I also vividly remember pictures and video footage of cracked, dry earth where once lush forests had stood. I was horrified by these images and couldn’t understand why people would cut down the rainforest. I remember asking my father one night before bed,  “Why don’t they just make a law to stop those people from cutting down all the trees?” He told me something about it not being fair to tell the farmers that they could not cut down the trees to create farmland to feed their families. That seemed fair; but for the time being, I was still on the side of the wildlife.

 

When I started my bachelor's degree at the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!) I wanted to be like Jane Goodall, a field ethologist studying primate behavior. However, as my studies progressed and I gained experience through undergraduate research and study abroad opportunities, I began to suspect a misalignment between my professed academic interests and my passion for species conservation. By the time I graduated, I'd come to three realizations: 

1. Knowledge of a species’ behavioral ecology can certainly improve the effectiveness of management and preservation efforts, but only if those efforts are happening in the first place. 

2. The existence and success of conservation efforts and the mitigation of human-caused threats often hinges on understanding and influencing how people interact with the natural world.

3. Strictly biocentric, “fortress” views of environmental conservation have caused more problems than they’ve fixed… for both people and the natural world.

 

These realizations led me to pursue a master’s degree from UGA's Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. I studied human dimensions of natural resources--a discipline devoted to understanding how peoples’ thoughts and feelings about natural resources and the environment influence individual behavior and group decision-making processes related to environmental policy, management, and resource use. My interest in learning how to do conservation better also led me to study program planning and evaluation. I was immediately drawn to evaluation’s practicality, its interdisciplinary nature (silos are for grain, not for knowledge), and its potential to foster learning and program improvement. In combining my enthusiasm for evaluation with my passion for conservation, I discovered a professional calling.

 

After graduation, I found my first professional home at the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT). I worked for ACT for almost seven years. I started as an intern and ultimately coordinated the monitoring, evaluation, reporting, and learning (MERL) efforts across the organization. I worked at ACT's administrative and fundraising headquarters near Washington, D.C. and occasionally traveled to our regional program offices based in Colombia and Suriname. For me, ACT represents many of the best qualities of the nonprofit sector: it is full of intensely passionate, mission-driven, (overly) hard working, and team-oriented staff; its work is grounded in a deep respect for the indigenous and local communities with whom it partners; and its programs achieve impactful results. 

 

Working at ACT was incredibly inspiring. It was also not all rainbows and fairy lights. As the coordinator of our adaptive program management and grant reporting efforts, I had a front-row seat to view how global power and wealth inequality shaped our work. I witnessed indigenous communities struggle to gain sovereignty over lands their ancestors had inhabited for time immemorial. I watched our team conscientiously navigate, minimize and, whenever possible, invert the power differentials inherent in our organizational structure: we had a headquarters in the Global North coordinating and fundraising for program efforts in the Global South and our program offices comprised mostly of urban, non-indigenous staff working with indigenous and local communities in some of the Amazon's most remote regions. I also saw the time and people-power that we as a medium-sized nonprofit needed to expend in order to acquire the funding we needed to do our work and pay our people. 

 

In particular, I recall the difficulty of planning for programs’ financial and administrative sustainability. For some initiatives there were fairly straight-forward (though by no means unchallenging or fail-safe) strategies by which program sustainability could be achieved. These included income generation programs or programs designed for eventual incorporation by their country’s national government. However, without ACT’s ongoing funding and staffing many of our programs and their associated benefits would have faded to non-existence even in our most dedicated partner communities. Unfortunately, ACT is far from the only nonprofit to run into this quandary. There are many nonprofit initiatives that cannot and should not be designed with capitalist values because that would be anathema to their purpose. At the same time, most of these worthwhile initiatives require more resources than volunteer labor to keep them running. Thus, they require ongoing funding, which must be acquired from donors. In particularly jaded moments, I remember thinking: if I’d really wanted to make a real difference in the field of conservation, I should have pursued a more lucrative career and donated the majority of my income to ACT. It was observations like these that originally sparked my interest in the economics of conservation and community development and helped set the stage for my current academic studies and research.

 

While at ACT, I also had the great fortune of getting involved with the work of the Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) and in the American Evaluation Association (AEA). The CMP’s Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (OS) formed the basis for my evaluation practice while at ACT. Through the AEA Indigenous Evaluation TIG (topical interest group), I was introduced to the inspiring concept of using evaluation as a decolonizing force. I also found utilization-focused evaluation (UFE) and developmental evaluation (DE) particularly useful in the context of my role at ACT. These concepts, theories, and approaches in evaluation and adaptive management--now joined by Blue Marble Evaluation (BME) and Equitable Evaluation (EE)--continue to shape my work in the field of evaluation.

 

In 2018, I moved from the D.C. area to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. This necessitated me leaving ACT, and I decided it was time for me to return to school for my PhD. I’ve always enjoyed teaching. Also, I believe there is great untapped potential in leveraging the enthusiasm and expertise of college students to provide research and other services to on-the-ground conservation and social justice practitioners. As a professor, I would be in a position to facilitate the establishment and smooth execution of these service-learning partnerships. Furthermore, I felt I was at a point in my career where I possessed enough real-world experience to make the most of my doctoral experience. Pursuing my doctoral degree is allowing me the opportunity to dedicate time and focus to fill knowledge and skills gaps, surround myself with mentors in my chosen profession, and establish professional networks that will help me be as effective as possible in contributing meaningfully to my field.