We are pleased to invite you to the first bilingual English/Russian PARTNERS Principles Workshop to help build capacity for engaging in community based conservation (Please see the invitation in Russian and kindly share it among your contacts). The PARTNERS principles comprise a set of eight key principles and are a resource for engaging with communities to ensure more effective, ethical, and inclusive conservation.

 The online workshop will take place in the last week of August 23-26th over four days (total 12 hours). The workshop has been customized to address the conservation practitioners and government officials from Central Asian snow leopard range countries, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

 About the PARTNERS Principles

Engaging and partnering with local communities is critical to the success of conservation efforts. The practical challenges of achieving effective engagement are considerable and conservation practitioners often learn from trial and error.

 A set of principles and guidelines for community-based conservation, called the ‘PARTNERS principles’, have been developed based on the extensive experience of snow leopard conservation practitioners. These eight key principles, namely Presence, Aptness, Respect, Transparency, Negotiations, Empathy, Responsiveness and Strategic Support, provide the required framework to develop and implement community-based conservation programs that has been identified as the preferred approach for snow leopard conservation in the Bishkek Declaration. 

 A workshop and an online toolkit has been developed to allow for practitioners to gather and discuss experiences and conservation issues and apply these Principles. If you are a conservation practitioner, or are preparing to work in conservation, the PARTNERS Principles may help you explore, discuss and share different perspectives and approaches to community-based conservation. Over 100 individuals (from NGO to protected area staff) have already participated in this training program, and we continue to evolve the training based on feedback. 

 About the Workshop

This workshop has been co-created by a team of snow leopard conservation practitioners. The live training sessions will be led by an international resource team from Kyrgyzstan, India and Europe. Additional special guests from across the snow leopard range will also be invited to share their expertise and experiences. The resource team will be supported by professional translators. 

 The workshop will be offered online (using the Zoom software) so that we can safely bring teams together and exchange ideas/thoughts related to community conservation. The workshop is interactive and teams will be encouraged to share, discuss and present experiences and learnings of community conservation. The training will be offered in English and Russian and simultaneous translations will be provided. We recommend all participants to attend the complete set of seminars as they are interconnected and build on each other. 

 Dates & Time

August 23-26th 2021

13:00- 16:00 Bishkek time Monday to Thursday (four sessions, 3 hours each, totalling 12 hours)

 Please confirm if you, your team members or partners are available to participate in the workshop by filling in the form. We request that you can provide us with the full name, email and language preference (English or Russian) of each interested participant. We are dedicated to supporting diversity and we especially would encourage women to join and take part in this workshop in order to promote equal representation. 

 Thank you for considering to join us for this Upcoming workshop. We look forward to hearing from you!

Best wishes,

The PARTNERS team