A Whitley Award is just the beginning

By Charudutt “Charu” Mishra, 2022 Whitley Gold Award winner 

A prestigious conservation prize. A substantial grant. A global platform to amplify vital conservation work. A Whitley Award is all these things. But after 21 years as an Awardee, a grantee, an assessor of applications, and more recently, a judge, I think of it differently: as a relationship, a community, and a platform from which big ideas for nature conservation can emerge.

An opportunity to take conservation to the next level

When I first received a Whitley Award in 2005, my work on snow leopards with the Nature Conservation Foundation was rooted in Himalayan villages, working with Indigenous peoples to reduce conflict. Over the years, support from Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN) has helped us take our approach and ideas much further through the International Snow Leopard Trust.

We’ve expanded our conservation work across landscapes and countries; shaped national policies and helped create an intergovernmental alliance of all 12 snow leopard range states. We have converted hunting concessions into conservation areas in Kyrgyzstan; and helped establish Mongolia’s largest co-managed protected area for snow leopards. Most recently, WFN support has helped us expand our snow leopard conservation efforts to Nepal. A Whitley Gold Award in 2022 enabled us to take lessons from decades of community-centred conservation to practitioners far beyond the snow leopard range.

This is why I do not think of a Whitley Award as a one-off recognition or a one-year grant. WFN’s Continuation Funding has repeatedly allowed our work to evolve and grow. Legal support facilitated by WFN has helped in moments when conservation threats demanded expertise we did not have. Bursaries available to the network of Whitley Awardees have helped me travel, learn and build connections with other conservationists. Some of my most valuable collaborations have grown from the Whitley Award community; the idea that became the Ethical Conservation Alliance was nurtured through those relationships. WFN encourages this type of collaboration, peer learning and relationship-building among its alumni.

Collaboration, leadership, ambition, feasibility: A successful application

Since 2009, I have helped evaluate Whitley Award applications, first as an assessor of applications and later as a member of the Judging Panel. The official guidance is clear: applicants must demonstrate solid evidence for their approach as well as strong teamwork, community involvement, measurable impact, ambition, and feasibility.

I look for leaders, not lone heroes while judging the applications. I want to see a diverse team with the knowledge, values, and credibility to deliver real impact. I look for ideas that have been tested, but also for the larger vision behind the next step. I look for scientific rigour and respect for different ways of thinking, but equally for empathy, humility and honesty.

For me, the most interesting part of an application is where evidence meets ambition. “We will train 200 people” tells me what you will do. But I want to know the basis of that initiative, what will be different when those 200 people are trained, how you track and measure that change, why it matters for nature and people, and what larger vision it could help realise.

The long-term vision

Conservation is a crisis discipline. We are often too busy responding to the next problem to step back and ask where our work could lead in five or ten years. Preparing an application for a Whitley Award is a rare opportunity to do that. That larger vision can make an application come alive. Use the process of writing the application as an opportunity to think bigger and more ambitiously about what your work could become.

And remember, not being selected is not a verdict on the worth of your work. It’s an opportunity to sharpen your proposal and reapply if eligible.

If you are selected, take a moment to celebrate. Then get ready: you’re just at the beginning of a new phase. A Whitley Award is an honour, but also a significant responsibility, to your team, to the communities who make your work possible, and to the future of nature conservation.