Conservation Optimism

Conservation Optimism is a global grassroots movement dedicated to inspiring and empowering people around the world to make a positive difference for nature.

Conservation Optimism is a global community dedicated to inspiring and empowering people around the world to make a positive difference for nature. It is committed to fostering effective action, interest and wonder in the natural world, across generations, borders, languages, and cultures.

Conservation Optimism’s work across a variety of channels is dedicated to equipping, enabling, and empowering conservationists at all career stages and from all backgrounds. It is building a community whose members can draw strength, resilience and energy from togetherness and shared purpose. One of its key aims is to amplify the reach of conservation by transforming the discourse from ‘doom and gloom’, into a refreshing vision of the future of nature and how to get there.

Conservation Optimism has made extraordinary progress since it was founded at a summit in the University of Oxford in 2017. Since then, it has held another summit in 2019 which was attended by conservationists from around the world, built its social media following to >20,000 followers, launched regional hubs (the first one is in India), run film festivals, produced a podcast series, developed a toolkit to help communicators reframe their conservation messages positively, published hundreds of conservation stories from around the globe, trained journalists to report environmental issues with a solutions lens, and built a worldwide network of over 100 organisations (Conservation Network of Optimists Worldwide, ConservationNOW).

Synchronicity Earth is a member of ConservationNOW and has supported Conservation Optimism throughout its journey so far, as this movement aligns with our values and mission to make the conservation movement as inclusive as possible, and to help more people feel empowered to make a difference for biodiversity. Some Synchronicity Eath partners were running sessions in the last Conservation Optimism Summit and our team use the principles of Conservation Optimism in our programmes, as Helen Meredith describes: You cannot build what you cannot imagine.