New Mexico Wildlife Federation: Mi Tierra Salvaje
Strategic Priority
Capacity Building, Conservation Education, and Coordination of Conservation Policies - Conservation Education
Project Documents
Project Description
The goal of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation (NMWF)- Mi Tierra Salvaje (My Wild Land) project is to develop and test an outdoor education model that will successfully engage underserved youth in the outdoors by improving on conservation education programming (Strategic Priority 3, Coordination, Capacity Building & Fish and Wildlife Agencies Support-Leadership Development, Conservation Education) to create new generations of diverse hunting and fishing enthusiasts and conservationists. With an FY2022 Multistate Conservation Grant award, NMWF will achieve this goal by implementing a three-phased approach:
- Research, identify, and compile best practices from conservation education programs nationwide.
- Implement and test existing best practices in a demonstration project addressing known entry barriers for underserved youth. Evaluate the program and findings.
- Convene regional partners to share challenges, successes, and findings and identify opportunities to improve collaboration and the overall impact of outdoor education efforts to engage underserved youth.
Compiling leading best practices, demonstration project evaluation, and convening findings will be synthesized to create a Toolkit for Youth and Family Engagement in the Outdoors. The Toolkit can be used as a roadmap for developing or improving outdoor education programs to be relevant, inclusive, culturally sensitive, and responsive to the needs of underserved youth in a community or region. The project will be carried out in close coordination with the New Mexico Department of Game & Fish, the Texas Conservation Alliance, the Arizona Wildlife Federation, and the Oklahoma Wildlife Conservation.
Federation. NMWF is a credible and nonpartisan leader on state conservation policy that delivers information to more than 50,000 people in New Mexico and over 50 national partners through the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) affiliate structure.
Project Facts
- Organization Name: New Mexico Department of Game and Fish
- Organization Status: State Government
- State: New Mexico
- Obligation: $245,400
- Start Date: 01-01-2022
- End Date: 12-31-2022
Results
Understanding that few organizations have worked in fishing and angling, our team sought to understand what strategies would be particularly helpful to newer organizations. Because of this, our research sought to identify programmatic, organizational, and marketing strategies that could help organizations become more effective at engaging youth. Our team also focused on obtaining these best practices, to the extent possible, from local partners and national organizations. To this end, our team employed the following mixed-method approach:
Our team worked with Nature Niños staff to identify 30 organizations (practitioners in the field) that offer similar outdoor education programming, including hunting and angling.
Each organization was invited to share its best practices and biggest challenges in recruiting and retention.
All 30 organizations received an email describing the goal of the project and a link to a presurvey to capture key information from the organization. The pre-survey had 20 questions that were a combination of free response and multiple choice, completed on Google Surveys. Twenty-one organizations completed the pre-survey questionnaire.
All 21 respondents were invited to participate in a 1-hour listening session each.
The listening session had between 3-5 participating organizations. Each followed a semi-structured interview guide that sought to understand what programs each organization was offering and where and what programmatic, organizational, and marketing challenges they were experiencing. Participants were also asked to share strategies they had developed to overcome such challenges. The sessions were recorded using Otter.ai and analyzed for key themes and patterns.
