Art for Gorillas

Category: Art of Conservation (AoC) | Date: Sep 20 2008 | By: Julie

Greetings! This is Julie reemerging from a brief time out - visiting friends and family in the US, returning to my Rwanda studio to contend with a horrible internet connection, and then finding our project waylaid by the powers that be! Not always easy here, to say the least.

Art of Conservation is set to establish its conservation learning program through art-based activities into Rwanda’s primary and perhaps secondary school curricula. The groundwork has been laid and now Valerie, Eric and I must put into words, graphs, tables, statistics, and any other form (we’ve got plenty messages through art, but that doesn’t seem to suffice) to convey our project as a meaningful and sustainable partner in conservation.

Classes are postponed until January 2009, which is such a bummer. When we’re teaching the children, Valerie, Eric and I, are certain that our approach to conservation really works - the children are engaged, parents are pleased, we constantly receive requests from other school headmasters for the project to be implemented at their schools.

I’ll try to better embrace the ‘growing pains’ we are experiencing. It is positive on many accounts - the project has filed for its own 501(c)3 status both in the US and Rwanda, we are looking forward to having closer relationships with other partner organizations, and we’re extremely happy about working closer with educators so that our program can be sustainable and still operating in the many years to come.

Please share any comments, criticism, ideas, and/or encouragement which you think may help us improve our conservation learning project and how we may better waltz through the bureaucratic red tape.

A plethora of pictures, profiles of people in conservation, and life in Rwanda is still coming your way - enjoy.

I put this collection of drawings together from our lesson Animals of the Virunga Forest and had it printed as a banner while I was at home in the US. The banner material is durable for displaying the people’s work outside, for instance, along the road leading to their villages and schools.

Tags: Art of Conservation (AoC)