Becoming a Fellow: An Overview of the Kinship Fellows Application

The application due date for the 2015 cohort of Kinship Conservation Fellows is January 26, 2015.

Join Kinship Fellows Director Nigel Asquith (2005 Fellow), Vice President Renee Michaels, and Communications Associate Catherine Rabenstine for a look at what sets the Kinship Fellows program apart from other professional development opportunities and a walk-through of the eligibility requirements and essay questions involved in completing a Kinship Conservation Fellows application.   

Featured Speakers

Nigel Asquith is the Director of the Kinship Conservation Fellows program, as well as Director of Strategy and Policy at the Santa Cruz-based Fundación Natura Bolivia (www.naturabolivia.org and www.bolivianature.org), where since 2003, his team has helped create a new 734,000 hectares protected area and has set up 30 municipal incentive based conservation programs, which annually support 2,000 families with $200,000 worth of alternative development   projects, thus helping them to conserve 87,000 hectares of biodiverse tropical forests. These “reciprocal watershed  agreements” (RWA) have been replicated and scaled up by other organizations across the Andes.

Nigel was a Kinship Conservation Fellow in 2005, and from 2005-2008, he directed the transition of the $17 million EcoFund Foundation to become a strategic conservation investor in northern Ecuador. He has also worked at the Smithsonian Institution, the Center for International Forestry Research, Conservation International, and the World Bank. Nigel’s work is currently funded by the European Commission and the MacArthur Foundation, and he previously received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund, and the UK’s Department for International Development.

Nigel’s technical expertise is in plant-animal relations in neotropical forests, ecosystem service valuation, policy analysis, and the impacts of the oil and gas sector on biodiversity. Nigel has an extensive research program, most recently based out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, assessing the feasibility of market-based tools for environmental management. Nigel was a Rufford Fellow at Harvard’s Sustainability Science Program in 2009 and a Charles Bullard Fellow at Harvard Forest in 2014. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Oxford University in 1989, a master’s in Ecology from the University of Illinois in 1994, a master’s in Policy and a Ph.D. in Zoology from Duke University in 1999.

Renee Michaels is Vice President of Kinship Foundation, a private operating foundation established by the Searle Family to advance its institutional philanthropy.

Renee manages the Foundation and oversees its three program areas: Kinship Conservation Fellows, an international environmental leadership training program; Searle Scholars Program, a leading national biomedical research grant program; and the Family's Chicago-based biomedical, conservation, and education grantmaking initiatives through the Searle Funds at the Chicago Community Trust. Renee joined the Foundation in 2002, and during her tenure has led several significant strategic planning initiatives and change processes, including transitioning operations for Kinship Conservation Fellows in house.  Renee has served as adjunct faculty at DePaul University's School of Public Service Management, where she also obtained a graduate degree.  Renee's undergraduate degree is in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University. 

Catherine Rabenstine has worked at Kinship Foundation as the Communications Associate since 2012.  She is the Community Manager for Kinship Conservation Fellows and is lucky to be the staff member onsite in Bellingham, Washington during the program.

When
Thursday, January 15, 2015 through Thursday, January 15, 2015
1 PM - 2 PM

Where
Webinar

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