NGO’s Gather For Wildlife Empathy Workshop
Fourteen NGO’s have gathered at the Belize Zoo for Wildlife Empathy Training. Over the past week, the organizations were participants in a workshop hosted by the Belize Zoo team, as well as a team from the Milwaukee Zoo in the United States. The workshop’s goal is to foster collaboration in wildlife conservation between communities and encourage peer learning amongst the organizations. News Five’s Britney Gordon visited the event today for more information.
Britney Gordon, Reporting
For the past week, the Belize Zoo has been the host of fourteen NGO representatives as part of an educational conservation workshop in partnership with the Milwaukee Zoo. Today marked the last day of events for the teams, who reflected on a successful week of learning and collaboration.
Noeli Chable
Noeli Chable, Education Officer, Belize Zoo
“The events going on here at the Belize Zoo for the past week, actually, have been a series of workshops carried out by the Milwaukee Zoo. There are zookeeper workshops going on for the zookeepers, of course. And this year, for the first time, we are carrying out our Empathy for Wildlife workshop currently, which started yesterday. It’s a two day workshop on the 23rd and the 24th. We invited our partners, our NGOs, and we have a total of 14 participants today. So, it’s been great. For this event, basically I would like to describe it as a celebration for non formal educators. We were able to gather and speak about our unique experiences as educators. For these NGOs in the conservation room, so it’s been quite exciting to learn about the different or specific tasks that each NGO does through their educators and the amazing work that they do towards conservation, whether it be, terrestrial wildlife or marine wildlife or the environment itself.”
The Milwaukee Zoo, the partner host of the event, decided to visit Belize after a wild Jaguar unfit to return to the wild was donated to the zoo from Belize. Since then, the team has visited Belize and hosted workshops as a gesture of appreciation for the past seven years.
Auriana Donaldson
Auriana Donaldson, Conservation Programs Coordinator, Zoological Society of Milwaukee
“So we started doing annual keeper workshops here. This is our seventh annual workshop at the Belize Zoo. We bring knowledge that we’ve learned here, or we learned in Milwaukee here to Belize. And we exchange information. We learn just as much from folks here in Belize and bring it back to Milwaukee as we do when we bring knowledge here to Belize as well. We collaborate with staff here at the Belize Zoo to figure out what topics are of interest. They range from event planning and fundraising to behavior work with the animals here training. We bring a veterinarian with us to help talk about veterinarian topics and better care for the animals. And then what’s really exciting about this year is we have our education team here to lead a empathy workshop with Noelie here at the Belize Zoo. So we’re really excited to start talking more about education and outreach and bringing empathy to Belize here too.”
Florentino Chiac
Florentino Chiac, Science manager, Ya’axché Conservation Trust.
“It’s a platform for you to network and also, um, you know, communicate or interact with different conservation partners to, to actually share what you have learned. And, you know, Take it as a learning lesson and use different approaches and also this workshop has allows, you know, providing materials to actually Show us that there are different approaches how you could, you know, communicate results to like different target audience and using out 1:33 different mediums.”
We spoke with one of the fourteen participants to hear what they’ve gained from the workshop thus far.
Monique Vernon
Monique Vernon, Program Coordinator, Crocodile Research Coalition
“There’s a lot that I’ve learned and basically like refreshing my memory because most of the things that were mentioned we’ve already incorporated in our outreach and education program. However, it’s a great way for me to fine tune what we do and develop new activities and new methods of sharing empathy about wildlife.”
Britney Gordon for News Five.
