Conservation Training

WE BELIEVE

That conservation is as much about understanding and working with people as it is about studying Nature.

The most successful conservation initiatives are those that incorporate multiple tools. This page is for conservation professionals or students who want to grow their tool box.

Alan HesseLinkedInMeet your instructor
A veteran conservation biologist with 30 years’ experience in field research, project management and training, Alan J. Hesse first entered the world of biodiversity conservation by jointly leading a zoological expedition to the Bolivian Amazon in 1992.

Armed with little else than a battered backpack, a mosquito net and a borrowed pair of 1950’s binoculars Alan stayed on in Bolivia where he founded a conservation project from scratch, conducted extensive fieldwork and delivered field-based training for indigenous citizen scientists, in the process gaining a MSc in Conservation Biology.

Alan’s career went on to include environmental education in the Galápagos Islands before joining Rare to project-manage, train and mentor local conservation leaders in Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia on applied social marketing as well as research, monitoring and evaluation. Alan has since delivered training on social marketing to dozens of mid-career conservation professionals from many countries around the world.

Alan is currently based in Ecuador, where he continues to advance his conservation career alongside parallel initiatives promoting environmental education and climate literacy.

Get in touch

SOCIAL MARKETING TRAINING

Conservationists work with people who often have a very different outlook to their own. Social marketing enables conservationists to truly understand the human factors driving the threats to natural systems, so that they may effectively work with local communities by establishing new social norms that benefit both people and Nature.
Check out our training on social marketing as a tool for community-level behaviour change.
Find out more

Raine Donohue

Conservation Grants Associate
Rainforest Trust, USA


“Alan Hesse conducted an engaging, insightful, and fun workshop on social marketing during my attendance at the Kinship Conservation Fellowship. He guided us through participatory discussions and group activities to identify the key components and outcomes of social marketing in the field of conservation. I found his session to be one of the most useful in thinking about human behavior change and how social marketing can be used to achieve conservation goals.”

Marcelo Stabile

Carbon Manager
ECCON, Brazil


“Alan’s classes on social marketing made me realize the importance of the topic. More so, they helped me re-think the way I engaged and worked with local stakeholders and communities. The classes were great and changed my approach.”