By Claudia Taylor | Creative Development Assistant, MAR Leadership
Dear friends and supporters,
Happy (northern hemisphere) summer! We have a lot of news to share with you, but first and foremost we encourage you to check out this amazing video about the MAR Leadership Program. We're thankful to Céline Cousteau and The TreadRight Foundation for making this video a reality! A link to Part 2 is in the links list at the bottom of this report.
Planning for 2014:
Last week in the MAR Leadership Program we had our annual strategic planning meeting in order to create our work plan for next year. Our Executive Committee (Carlos Saavedra, María José González, and Lorenzo Rosenzweig) was present in this meeting. They gave us excellent advice on how to organize our next cohort in order to keep supporting conservation at Mesoamerican Reef. A lot of great ideas came up, and we’ll be sharing them with you shortly. We expect to launch our next call for applications in September.
MAR Fellow updates:
MAR Leadership external evaluation:
With the third cohort completing the program, the MAR-L Executive Committee decided to test the program premises and learn from MAR-L’s experience and the field to identify what is working and what could increase MAR-L’s impact.
The evaluation, carried out by Leadership Learning Community, was designed to gather data (input from fellows, observations of projects, and feedback from co-workers, supervisors, and fishers) to answer three questions:
In summary, the results are the following:
In its first three years, MAR-L has achieved impressive results on multiple levels. The curriculum design has facilitated deep personal transformation and fostered strong bonds within and across cohorts. These bonds are translating into action and benefits to MAR as fellows share learning and techniques that enhance their performance. There are many examples of fellows seeking each other out as partners in transnational meetings or to successfully champion a protected area. Fellows understand that enduring change in the MAR will not happen without the involvement of fishermen; in every site visit conducted, this was evident in the clear affection between fellows and people from their communities. It is early in the program to expect systems-level change, yet the program is clearly delivering results and affirming the premise that young leaders can be successfully supported to implement new and replicable ideas that can contribute significantly to the health of the MAR. MAR-L now has the potential to build on these successes and chart new territory in leadership development by focusing on increasingly concrete goals and by building for continued network growth and success.
Project design manual:
Our fellows receive high-quality training in project design from Paquita Bath (Aligning Visions). Recently, we decided we wanted to share this training more widely. The result is the MAR Leadership Resource Book, an 80-page instruction manual, co-authored by Paquita Bath and María Eugenia Arreola, which will soon be publicly launched (we are finalizing the Spanish version). The manual has already been circulated to members of our Executive Committee, as well as among participants at the CCNet and Creating Space conferences that Program Director María Eugenia Arreola attended in April and May 2013.
This manual is a complete training curriculum showing how the MAR Leadership Program has adapted the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation methodology for small-scale projects. Our approach is designed to empower individual action that can build on the local connections, commitment, and place-based understanding that are necessary for effective projects.
We hope that with the publication of the MAR Leadership Resource Book, more MAR region stakeholders will have access to a guide for designing excellent conservation projects.
Links:
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