Case study: Department of Conservation

More and more New Zealanders are giving their time as conservation volunteers to help look after New Zealand’s biodiversity, historic and cultural heritage.

Responding to people’s desire to get involved in conservation, the Department of Conservation (DOC) has been running volunteer programmes since 1988.  Around 7,000 individual volunteers help out with DOC work every year, contributing the equivalent of over 20,000 workdays.

More recently, there has been a rapid increase in the number of community groups volunteering for conservation. The groups are mostly regionally-focused, committing significant amounts of time to restoring local bush habitats, undertaking pest control programmes, putting in tracks, planting trees and taking care of historic sites.

DOC now works in partnership with nearly 400 community conservation organisations, some of whom are undertaking ambitious mainland or island restoration and visitor projects on public conservation land.

Recognising this growing demand from the community to be hands-on involved in conservation and that the style of conservation volunteering was changing, DOC realised it needed to change its own working style.

DOC’s rangers and field staff were used to being the conservation experts and doing most of the work themselves. In the changing volunteering climate, community groups were now taking charge of projects, wanting to get involved in specialist work like the translocation of rare bird species, and were contributing important local and specialist knowledge and other skills. Those who didn’t have the skills, were keen to acquire them.

DOC’s role was changing – from ‘do it ourself’, to ‘do it with others’ and ‘support others so they can do it themselves’. Many staff needed to learn new ways of working.

In 2003, DOC launched a new strategy, the Conservation with Communities strategy, to improve its ability to work with communities to achieve enhanced conservation outcomes. The strategy aimed to bring about “a major cultural shift within the department to institutionalise working with the community to achieve the best possible conservation success.”

“Working with people is part of all conservation work, from pest control to archaeology, from visitor asset management to threatened species programmes” says the then Director General Hugh Logan in the strategy’s foreword.

“The way people get involved varies from time to time, place to place and community to community. It can be informing, consulting or involving communities in our work, or supporting them in theirs.”

One of the department’s initiatives that followed the release of the strategy was training for DOC staff in working with communities.

The From Seed to Success training includes a range of practical ideas and advice for establishing and running community projects and working constructively in partnerships. It provides templates, checklists and information and focuses on working with groups and other organisations in a wide range of contexts.

The information in the From Seed to Success training and associated manual draws on the knowledge and experience of people in DOC and communities across New Zealand, highlighting good practice from a range of projects. The two day training is delivered by two independent trainers who have a long background in community development and facilitation. Up to 40 DOC staff from all levels of the organisation – managers to rangers - attend each training.

Since the first From Seed to Success training was piloted, 16 trainings have been run for over 400 DOC staff throughout the North and South Islands.

The most recent From Seed to Success training, held in Shantytown on the West Coast in August 2007, trialed a new delivery format.

Members of DOC’s community partner groups were invited to the second day of the training to take advantage of the course content that covers how to establish and run a successful conservation project.

DOC’s evaluation of the pilot notes that “the key highlight for most participants was having DOC staff and the community come together on day two. Many DOC staff and community participants valued the opportunity to network, build connections, and learn more about what the department and community groups were doing.”

The From Seed to Success training manual covers planning a project, working well as a group and checking progress and taking stock, and is most useful for voluntary groups at the start-up stage.

Case study uploaded December 2008.