We are currently setting up our community outreach programmes in conjunction with organisations such as Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots as well as the Plains of Camdeboo's Sophakama community partnership.

 

Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) is vitally important in linking the betterment of communities with the betterment of the natural world. If the people in the areas surrounding wildlife have no stake in the future of that wildlife, they have no incentive to protect it. And if they have no future prospects overall, they are not going to worry about whether or not someone is poaching a rhino they may never see. We are hoping to change this. And we hope to use our volunteer programme as one of the ways in which we increase our positive impact on the surrounding communities. 

 

Some projects we are working on include:
 

• Developing educational material to supplement the current environmental education course offering

• Travelling to community schools to help teach students about conservation (this includes information on jobs available in the field and how to get those jobs)

• Incorporating music and the arts to reach a larger portion of the student body and overall community

• Bringing youth and community leaders to the reserve for field trips to experience hands-on conservation work

• Creating sustainability-minded community gardens to help with local food production

• Developing and implementing recycling and composting programmes to assist with waste management

• In future, we hope to secure funding to provide field guide training to select members of the community 

 

 

One of the policies of Mount Camdeboo is to hire people from areas in as close proximity to the reserve as possible. We are interested in working with the people in our neighbourhoods, not excluding them. Therefore, we are speaking with various partner programmes which are aimed toward uplifting the local communities, particularly with regards to environmental education and sustainable development. And that's where Roots & Shoots and Sophakama come in. We hope that in building reciprocal relationships with them we can create a better world for not just our local communities, but our global one as well.