A message from The Wildlife Society

The Wildlife Society strives to ensure that all are welcome, heard and respected. Recent events in the United States have highlighted the continued racial injustice and inequity in our society. In this time full of uncertainty and pain for many of us, we stand with our friends, colleagues, neighbors and family members who live with fear and face consequences of institutional discrimination every day — within and outside of our profession.

Especially now, we hope to continue to work toward an empowering and inclusive profession where we celebrate and support Black professionals. We also believe it is important to highlight some of the organizations and individuals who create pathways and give a voice to those who have not always been heard within the conversation. We encourage you to connect with organizations such as:

• Diversify Outdoors
• Outdoor Afro
• Diversity Joint Venture for Conservation Careers
• Greening Youth
• Green 2.0

Many of us might be wondering what we can do to support each other. Embracing our role as allies can mean a lot of things, but it is important to remember to be consistently proactive and thoughtful. We cannot leave the burden solely on our underrepresented colleagues to take on the role of educator/mediator with respect to racism in this country and our professional communities. As allies, support is key, but a crucial aspect of our responsibility to each other is to amplify the voices of our underrepresented communities rather than simply add more voices to the conversation. Extensive information and new perspectives may be found by exploring the works of these individuals and others:

• Dorceta Taylor
• Drew Lanham
• Carolyn Finney
• Robin DiAngelo

The Wildlife Society pledges to do more than just say all are welcome. We promise to strengthen our commitment to our mission and remain dedicated to our responsibility to make diversity, equity and inclusion a priority in everything we do. As we continue this conversation and work toward lasting solutions, we encourage you to reach out and engage with us at tws@wildlife.org. We want to hear your thoughts, ideas, concerns, questions and success stories.

We look forward to ongoing opportunities for growth and learning with all of you.