Our annual Regional Winner Workshop brought together some of Latin America’s most innovative conservationists, fostering learning and forging connections that have the power to drive collective impact.
By David O’Connor, Grants and Network Manager, Whitley Fund for Nature
In September, over 30 people, including Whitley Award winners, their team members, WFN’s own conservation team, wider collaborators, and a journalist, gathered on a stretch of the Colombian Amazon in Puerto Nariño. The home to pink river dolphins and some of the region’s richest biodiversity. Co-hosted by WFN Conservation Partner Fundación Omacha, it was a week of peer-led learning, exchange and collaboration.
Together, we built the kind of relationships that conservation depends on. It is not only what happened during the workshop that matters, but what comes next. As participants take the knowledge gained back to their teams and continue to build on the connections forged during the week, it’s clear the impact of this gathering will be felt far beyond the Amazon.
Turning shared experiences into action
Protecting wildlife demands more than scientific expertise. Conservationists play a key role in bringing people together, building partnerships with local communities, governments, and other stakeholders to turn ideas into action.
This often means navigating conflict. One of the week’s standout sessions focused on conflict resolution and negotiation, providing participants with a suite of practical tools to help navigate challenging conversations. Drawing on real-world case studies, participants explored lessons learned from negotiations with communities protecting sea turtle nests along Costa Rica’s coastline and put their skills to the test in a mediation exercise centred on safeguarding pampas deer in Argentina.
2025 Whitley Award winner Arnaud Desbiez, working to conserve the largely overlooked Endangered three-banded armadillo, already has plans to apply his new skills in a real-life setting. Next year he will be convening conservationists, field professionals and institutions from across Brazil and neighbouring countries for a workshop to build the first national conservation strategy for the species.
“I honestly have no words to express what this workshop meant to me. It was an experience I will be digesting for the months to come, and it will have surely helped me as a conservationist.”
— Arnaud Desbiez, 2015 Whitley Award winner
This is just one story of many. Amongst other participants, new joint, multi-country proposals, cross-border conservation partnerships, and site-visit exchanges are already quietly taking shape: discussions around a multi-country sea turtle programme, a new joint proposal for the albatross and Galapagos petrel, and plans for joint training and field surveys across Chile and Brazil, to name a few. These are conversations that started over lunch in Puerto Nariño and are now becoming real, collaborative conservation work. That is the story this workshop keeps telling: a week of connection and learning turning into work that will outlast it by years.
What the numbers tell us
Before the workshop, we asked WFN’s Conservation Partners to be candid about where they felt least confident in their work. The week’s sessions were then designed with participants based on the gaps identified. Fundraising diversification and proficiency with new technology topped the list, with only one in four rating themselves confident in either. But the greatest challenge identified was access to resources. While almost all participants expressed motivation for their work, only a third felt that they had the resources needed to do it effectively.
By the end of the week, ninety percent of Whitley Award winners said the workshop had improved their access to resources, funding routes, tools, or connections. Every single winner rated their overall experience the maximum five out of five and would recommend the WFN Regional Winner Workshop to a fellow conservationist. Across five separate sessions, spanning leadership, conflict resolution, wellbeing and fundraising, an average of ninety-one percent said they were inspired to put what they’d learned directly into practice. This level of consistency across such a wide range of topics, taught by different facilitators, speaks for itself.
“Conservation is not only about having better data or better science. It is also about building trust, connecting people, strengthening institutions, and finding new ways to finance our work.”
— Paola Sangolquí, 2026 Whitley Award winner
Building a network to lean on
Spread across many different species and countries, experienced conservation leaders often feel alone in their work with little opportunity to connect with peers. One session on wellbeing and resilience provided an opportunity for intergenerational exchange, connecting those earlier in their leadership journey with more experienced conservationists.
One Conservation Partner decades into a career working on tapirs sat beside a younger leader, and together they built a two-way exchange of advice. Protect your family time was heard from the more experienced; teach us the how, not just the theory said the younger generation. It was the power of openness and honesty cultivated during the week that meant someone who had submitted thirteen failed funding proposals before one finally succeeded was able to share not only their failures, but most importantly, what changed on the fourteenth attempt.
“There are moments when the coming together of people, places and events gives rise to a magical experience. Our meeting, brought about by WFN, began as a meeting of minds and flowed naturally into a connection of hearts; it was, without a doubt, one of those moments… A moment in which everything flows and where kindness, curiosity, learning, wonder, and admiration intertwine amongst an extraordinary group of people.”
— Rachel Graham, 2011 Whitley Award winner
None of this happens without a room, a week, and the funding to bring people to it. Our thanks go to Fernando Trujillo, Catalina Botia and the rest of the team at Fundación Omacha for opening their home on the river to host us. To Wildlife Conservation Network for their support throughout the week and to Ignacio Jiménez from the Effective Conservation Training Initiative. To Hempel Foundation and the other WFN supporters who’s funding made it possible. And to WFN’s Conservation Partners for sharing their passion, honesty and experience with the group.
Long-term investment in conservation leaders
WFN’s Whitley Impact Accelerator exists to build weeks like this one, for conservationists who would otherwise be doing extraordinary work in isolation. Regional Winner Workshops are an investment in the leaders who drive vital conservation work, the ones that turn a good idea in one country into a shared strategy across three, and a lonely fight into a supported one.
If you’d like to help fund our next Regional Winner Workshop in Asia, you’d be backing an often underappreciated yet proven driver of real, on-the-ground conservation impact. It’s exactly the kind of week that changes what’s possible for the people already doing this work, and for the species and places depending on them.
Please email our Head of Partnerships, Yasemin Ulusoy, for more information.
Learn more about the Whitley Impact Accelerator
