Conservation Leadership master’s students completing capstone projects in Belize launched a crowd funding campaign to send local women to a workshop to learn how to create jewelry from the invasive lionfish as a part of efforts to reduce the country’s population of the invasive fish.

The Warner College of Natural Resources students from the program are calling Belize home for half a year while collaborating with local organizations on various conservation projects. They heard about the Blue Ventures led jewelry workshop while on a field trip and decided to take action to help more local women attend so that they could be empowered to help address the issues around the invasive fish.

Lionfish, native to the Indo-Pacific, have spread rapidly across the western Atlantic and Caribbean and now can be found from Rhode Island to Brazil. Invasive and venomous, these fish have been named as one of the globe’s major conservation threats. They outcompete native fish and harm coral reef ecosystems. The goal of this workshop was to increase demand for the fish in order to encourage higher catches of lionfish by fishers, while also providing women with additional income.

The students were inspired by this project and the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of local women. In a matter of two days, even using free time while their van was broken down on the side of the road, the students created a crowd funding website and promotional video. They raised over $2,000 in just 27 days to provide four more women with the opportunity to attend the workshop.

“The students recognized where they could make a difference and they committed to the task, even though there were so many obstacles to overcome since the work had to be done in a very tight time frame while traveling in Belize,” said Jennifer Solomon, a professor for the Conservation Leadership program and the students’ advisor. “It is inspiring to see our students collaborate to have a positive impact in the places where we work. There is no doubt that these are our future conservation leaders – committed, inventive and collaborative.”

The workshop participants learned how to handle, prepare and treat the lionfish fins to be turned into jewelry. They also learned about marketing strategies and finances to ensure that their jewelry business will be successful, and will continue to receive regular support from Blue Ventures as they grow their businesses. The students attended the workshop to help with translations, take photos, and learn the process to create a step by step worksheet for the participants to reference later.

“It was so inspiring to see how much the participants bonded over creating beautiful jewelry from this invasive fish threatening the Belize Barrier Reef,” says Megan Jones, one of the Conservation Leadership students attending the workshop.

“Some of the women came from fishing families, and were proud to be able to help protect their communities’ traditional livelihoods. We felt lucky to be able to support that process in a small way, and the women were very grateful to all the people who helped them by donating to the crowdfunding campaign,” she added.

The Conservation Leadership students have impacted these women’s lives. Two of these students will continue working with Blue Ventures to analyze the feasibility of a local consumer market for lionfish. The hope is that a consumer market will increase catches of lionfish and lower their populations in Belize. There is no doubt that multiple measures will be needed to limit the lionfish population – and the bigger the movement of people working to control the invasion, the more likely it will succeed.

The Conservation Leadership Program is an award-winning Master’s Degree program offered through the Department of Human Dimensions in the Warner College of Natural Resources at CSU. The program prepares leaders to address complex conservation issues across the globe through coursework at CSU’s main campus and applied project-based experiences abroad. Students from the fourth cohort of Conservation Leadership are currently completing projects in Belize, Uganda, Kenya, Nicaragua, New Zealand, and the United States.

Written by Terra Sampson, Jennifer Solomon, and Rob Novak in October 2015

Video credit to CBS4-CBS Denver. View CBS4 story here.