We at Conservation Science Partners (CSP) are angry and deeply saddened by the loss of the lives of David McAtee, Tony McDade, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor in recent weeks. We recognize that their deaths are the latest in an ongoing pattern of police brutality and racist violence and bias within our society, which repeatedly harms the Black community and has claimed countless more whose names are not widely known. We recognize that the cumulative impacts of generations of violence and white supremacy on this continent is further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which affects Black and brown communities disproportionately due to health disparities that are a direct result of systemic racism.
To our Black colleagues, family, and friends: We stand in solidarity with you and grieve with you. We recognize your own and your ancestors’ generations of courage, brilliance, resistance, and resilience. We stand with you in calling out that Black Lives Matter and calling for actions in ourselves and our communities that fully respect, celebrate, and defend Black lives.
To all within the conservation community: It is notoriously evident that science and conservation have a long history of excluding Black people and their knowledge, expertise, creativities, and wisdom. As a community at CSP, we are far from fully achieving the diverse organizational community we desire and seek to co-create. Conscious of the racist threads of conservation’s history, we are actively working to shift the patterns of harm and exclusion that have starved our field of Black excellence. As we learn and work to disrupt the silence and systemic racism that persists within conservation communities, we urge our colleagues and partners to do the same, embracing the discomfort that this requires.
Our commitments: We are listening to Black voices and community leadership, and will listen more deeply. For the past three years we have been engaged in efforts to disrupt systemic racism within our organization and our field, and to co-create a culture of, and policies aligned with, inclusion, safety, and celebration of diversity and difference. Our efforts so far include implementation of equitable and inclusive recruitment and hiring practices and organizational policies; development of an internal equity team and budget lines; and staff and board equity and anti-racism trainings. We are in the process of diversifying our board. As we increase our commitment to the ongoing work above, we also donated this week to Act Blue’s fund in support of multiple community bail funds, and to Campaign Zero to support their work in identifying solutions, providing research and data to organizers and policymakers, and advocating to end police violence nationwide. We commit to incorporating priorities of the Black community into our annual giving, and are seeking new opportunities to support Black-owned businesses. As an organization that is currently primarily white and non-Black people of color, we pledge to continue to listen, and to continue to do all forms of the necessary work, recognizing that this burden is ours to carry, and not that of our Black colleagues and partners.
We honor the memory of all whose lives have been lost unjustly, who have passed into the realm of ancestors. May we do better in all of their names.
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