Pleased to meet you, from Ecuador!
Hello all and thank you for accepting me into this community!
Of British and French origin, I am currently based in Ecuador after having lived and worked as a conservationist in several Latin American countries over the past 30 years.
My approach to conservation is multidisciplinary and very much bottom-up, in that I learned (and continue to learn) through practice (though a Masters degree I gained in 2003 certainly helped!). My experience base is in wildlife field research, project management, environmental education, M&E and social research, capacity building and social marketing for behavior change at community level.
Fun fact: I also happen to be a cartoonist, and I now spend most of my time creating educational graphic novels about Nature, with particular focus on climate change and action. My aim is to help bring climate literacy to kids and their parents in all sectors of society through fun, action-packed comic books! I do this by weaving a fictional storyline with careful research. You can find out more about my books here. I would love to connect with anyone working on environmental education and particularly climate education, and also anything related to communication and information.
My conservation career started in 1992 when I helped set up and joined a University expedition to the Bolivian Amazon. What started out as a 3-month experience ended up being a life-changing inflection point that set my professional and personal course to the present day. My conservation experience was built bottom-up and hands-on, and includes field data collection and logistics, grassroots organization leadership and project management, community engagement and capacity building, M&E, training and behavior change, and lately climate education through authorship of graphic novels and other resources. My conservation career includes positions as a senior staff member and a principal investigator at the Bolivian BirdLife Partner Armonía, field investigator in the Gran Chaco with WCS Bolivia, field logistics officer for Conservation International's RAP expeditions, and Programme Manager and Senior Manager of M&E at Rare. I currently work as Senior Behaviour Change Specialist with TRAFFIC International, applying behavioural science approaches to support TRAFFIC's work across wildlife supply chains globally.
