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TMN Be the Change
June 15, 2021 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
The March TMN Tuesday was the inaugural event in the new Be the Change initiative, dedicated to exploring diversity, equity, and inclusion opportunities in our natural resource and conservation community. Just as the natural world thrives with biodiversity, our Texas Master Naturalist Program is dedicated to engaging all audiences in conservation, education and stewardship.
This mini-series will run April through September on the third Tuesday of the month (tentatively based on speaker availability). Each of the series will be one hour held at the 12-noon hour CST to allow TMNs to join over the lunch hour if still engaged in the workforce and each will also be recorded for viewing later. These sessions can also count for at least Advanced Training 1-Hour. One of the goals with this mini-series is to start and continue conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion within TMN. Another goal of this series is to build a strategic guide or ‘playbook’ for TMN Chapters to use to build diversity, equity, and inclusion programming into chapters activities. Speakers will share discussion questions and action items for each chapters and members to consider and execute as the series builds towards a capstone workshop – tentatively to be held Spring of 2022. Watch the chapter calendar for more details on this mini-series. Tentative dates for the remaining webinars in the series are:
- April 20th
- May 18th
- June 15th
- July 20th
- August 17th
- September 21st
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in general, and the Wildlife Diversity Program’s Urban Wildlife Technical Guidance Team specifically, has long recognized the need to increase our interactions with and response to traditionally underserved audiences. We recognize that implementing change at the Department-wide level can only be accomplished where the rubber hits the road: at the levels of individual employees and their teams. We also are finding that the transition from talking about change to accomplishing change can be challenging.
Our team decided to transfer our interest in the theoretical ideas of change to applied approaches in enacting change. We planned out specific actions with calendar targets to create actual, measurable progress toward the goals of increasing our understanding of and building connections with all audiences, especially with those we’ve previously underserved. Called the Urban Listening Tour, our team has done some impressive work gathering information and finding underserved places, but we are finding some unanticipated challenges in other areas. In this presentation, we’re going to talk about the specific actions we decided to take, what we hoped the outcomes would be, and what some of the real-world roadblocks have been. To inform this talk, the authors collected information on the progress on these goals, then conducted anonymous interviews with each member of the team to understand some of the roadblocks we’ve encountered. In this presentation, we encourage ourselves to feel some discomfort in facing these personal roadblocks head-on and hope our experiences can other groups as we all start to break down the walls between our good thoughts and some powerful actions.
Bridging the Gap: Getting New Audiences Outdoors in the Rio Grande Valley
This presentation takes a closer look into how nature centers in the Rio Grande Valley have successfully attracted new audiences to their programs. We take a closer look into how to create positive connections to non-traditional nature center visitors and how we can use what we have learned to reach out to new audiences in the future. Many of these concepts are universal and can be adapted to other groups and interests.
Chapter Panel
With our Be The Change series in full momentum, this month’s webinar will offer a chance to pause and reflect on the progress of the series so far.
The July 20th Be The Change webinar will focus on how our TMN Chapters have been able to contemplate and incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion ideas and resources shared thus far.
Various master naturalist chapters are working towards these efforts and will share case studies of experiences they’ve had in their progress.
Join us to collaborate and share resources your chapters may still need as your organizations build toward becoming more inclusive and diverse.
Don’t Count Me Out: Managing Relationships, Diversity and Inclusion
Ronnie McDonald served as Bastrop County Judge from during a time in which the population of the county doubled. He was elected at age 27, becoming one of the youngest to ever serve as a County Judge in the State of Texas and the first African American to be elected county wide in Bastrop County as well as one of two to become the 1st African American elected in Texas out of 254 counties. He oversaw a $31 million county budget and managed emergencies of flood and fire, including the largest fire in Texas history working across party lines to save lives and promote recovery. Prior to being elected, Judge McDonald served in the state comptroller’s office as Assistant Executive Director for Family Pathfinders. After retiring from the judgeship, he was the government relations and education liaison for the firm McCreary, Veselka, Bragg and Allen in Round Rock.
Most recently, McDonald served as Executive Director for Strategic Partnerships and Community Relations at Texas A & M University, working with the directors of the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service and the Texas A&M Forest Service to provide direction on strategic priorities and focus. He served as the primary contact point for other partners by providing updates on a variety of joint interests such as natural disasters, providing AgriLife agency support to rural communities and grant/partnership opportunities. Currently, Ronnie serves as a lead pastor at BOLD Church in Bastrop, Texas, and partner at Ruach Group Communications where he travels the nation training religious community leaders and helping communities map and manage assets for strong economies and strategic growth. Ronnie graduated from Texas A&M in 1993 with a bachelor’s in political science and business. He has been married to his wife, Dr. Ty Mills McDonald, for over 24 years and the couple has three children.
Playbook Resources:
- Being a change agent is about including and expanding your circle
- Because we have limited experience with people we give cast broad stereotypes.
- A lot of times we come to a community asking for something rather than coming to appreciate what they are doing and listening and learning from them.
- Because we don’t know, we don’t do.
From Awareness to Allyship: An intro to Black Outside, Inc and engaging BIPOC communities.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 and increased awareness of racial injustice, outdoor participation within black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities has increased. What does this increase mean for outdoor education? In what ways can one act in allyship to ensure a more inclusive outdoors in Texas? Learn from TEDxSan Antonio speaker and founder of Black Outside, Inc who will share more about the work of Black Outside, Inc and explore what it means to be in allyship with BIPOC communities in nature.
Prior to the session, Alex invites you to listen to his TED Talk linked here. Want to know more about Black Outside, Inc? Check out their amazing work here.
April Be the Change
Recording link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpi__5iNJHU
Mark your calendars for April 20th, 12pm CST for our next installment in our Be The Change mini-webinar series. We are very excited to host David Buggs, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer with Texas Parks & Wildlife Department.
The End of Outreach: Recognizing Unmet Conservation Audiences
Tuesday April 20th, 12:00 – 1:30pm central
The conservation community has come to realize that broadening the audience of people who care about our Natural Resources is important to the relevance, support for, and sustainability of, our ecosystems. Yet, outreach programs have long been a staple of conservation organizations for recruiting new users and creating interest in the outdoors. In recent years, the landscape of our population has become more diverse and more urban. And while the broad support for conservation has increased, active conservation supporters have decreased and remained dominated by a mostly white and predominately male constituency. How do we create a paradigm shift to increase the support for conservation without forcing assimilation and without losing current supporters at the same time?
The recorded session will be available on this page following the event.
Playbook Resources