Posts in: Reflections

When I came across the job posting for my role at COMPASS I completed my application in one sitting, submitting my materials just a couple hours after I found the opening. I felt like I’d finally found the niche I was looking for, a space squarely in between science and solutions.  Starting at COMPASS just over two years ago, I entered the broad and wonderful...

Latino Conservation Week, an initiative of Hispanic Access Foundation (HAF), was developed to celebrate the Latino community’s commitment to conservation and engage communities in outdoor recreational activities and stewardship. This annual celebration provides us with an opportunity to take a look into the critical conservation and advocacy performed by Latino r...

The culture of science often asks us to leave ourselves behind. The focus of our training is squarely on our research, not us. We build walls between our personal lives and our professional lives, between our emotional selves and our scientific selves. On our quest to contribute to a more just, equitable, and inclusive world, within science and beyond, these walls ...

Our values shape how we make decisions and show up in the world. But identifying core values and sharing them on a website is one thing; living them is another. This year has been a test of our values, and the resilience of our organization itself. And I’m proud of how we have found ways to live into our core values even as the world profoundly changed around us....

After a long and tumultuous election year, we look ahead to starting 2021 with a new President, whose administration will be worlds different from the one that came before. The incoming Biden-Harris Administration has a lot of work to do to repair, rebuild, and re-envision the role science can play in society. From restoring dismantled and understaffed scientific a...

“I can't be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist.” —James Baldwin We have had many dark days this year. There have been days when it has, both figuratively and literally (on the West Coast at least), been hard to see any light at all. Humans di...