Roles Among Communities Collaborating On Organized Natural Science

Abstract

While many conservation programs center around the work of professional scientists, a community conservation program seeks to involve all people in the protection of their natural resources. By incorporating many community members in a variety of roles, these programs can achieve more impactful results and create long-lasting, sustainable change. However, the variation in age, background, and experience in the participants filling these roles will have its own challenges. Participants often come to the program with their own expectations for what will create a successful program as well as their own desires for support from other participants. To prevent conflict and ensure progress, it is important for all involved to understand one another’s expectations and come to a shared understanding of the program’s roles.

This study involved five small group discussions with five different community conservation programs across the United States. These discussions incorporated the nominal group technique to promote full and equal participation from all participants. Each discussion involved participants from the following five roles: the community volunteer, the program coordinator, the outside professional, the educator, and the youth participant. In the discussions, participants shared their perspectives on how each role could or should be involved in their respective program, and they assigned points to the ideas they considered most important. The researcher used the results from all five discussions to create a list of themes to describe the nature of each role, with each theme receiving a score based on the points assigned by participants. The data collected through this process was used to assess the expectations held by participants in differing roles for their role and the role of others in these types of conservation programs, with further differentiation examining how their expectations for a successful program compared with their expectations for personal support in the program. Further analysis of the trends in this data was used to inform a series of recommendations for how participants in each of these roles could best be engaged with a conservation program. Ultimately, this research provides community conservation programs with a starting point for their own collaborative planning sessions to ensure the involvement and support of participants in all roles.