CANADIAN ENVIRONMENT & DIVERSITY COLLABORATIVE

CEDC

Canada is a country of great diversity, both biologically and culturally. Canada’s nature conservation organizations recognize the need to support this diversity in order to conserve the natural world upon which all life depends.

In recent years, Canadian nature conservation organizations have increased efforts to understand and develop ways of engaging more diverse audiences. This includes addressing sustainability and economic issues, incorporating social justice concerns, and making environmental matters personally relevant. Despite these efforts, we are not keeping pace with our country’s rapidly changing cultural diversity. The consequences are numerous missed opportunities and diminished relevance. 

It is time to take some steps to realign our groups with our society. We can do this by:

• taking measures to increase cultural diversity at all levels of our organizations’ cultures, and
• increasing our efforts to effectively engage diverse audiences.

To do this we need to create awareness within our organizations leading to institutional changes which will:

• foster cross‐cultural understanding and experiences to learn about differing perceptions of nature, traditions, existing knowledge,assumptions (stereotyping, biases) and cross‐cultural sensitivities;
• establish targets for increasing diversity at all levels within our organizations;
• plan and implement actions which will ensure that diversity is reflected in each organization’s “public face”;
• address known barriers (language, settlement issues, accessibility of information about conservation, etc.) as well as identify and deal with additional barriers;
• draw upon the knowledge and expertise of all people including traditional ecological knowledge as well as current research and innovations from around the world; and
• identify different audiences and their needs, leading to the development of relevant programs that facilitate greater  participation.