Indigenous Youth are keen to lead their own conservation projects rather than be treated merely as participants in externally-led initiatives — often confined to roles such as field assistants, translators, or sources of biodiversity knowledge. While most training programmes focus on technical skills - like monitoring or data collection - and cater to English-speaking individuals with access to resources, network and understanding of western conservation frameworks, few nurture indigenous leadership, visioning, or long-term stewardship.

Meanwhile, Conservation Practitioners who aspire to enable community-led in-situ conservation, often struggle to relate meaningfully to indigenous and local communities. Many find it difficult to unlearn biases and decolonise their approaches, often reproducing the same top-down models that disempower the very communities they aim to support.

The Grassroots Leadership Programme (GLP) caters to (i) Indigenous Youth, building conservation leadership at the community-level and (ii) Conservation Practitioners, who learn how to navigate their position and power in order to meaningfully support in-situ efforts and realise community-led aspirations. This leadership program is offered through an innovative indigenous-led pedagogical approach, which we pilot with indigenous communities in Nagaland and test in Uttarakhand, India and in the Masai Mara of Kenya.

During the project, Indigenous Youth and Conservation Practitioners collaborate, using their complementary skills to design and implement solutions to a real-life conservation problem while participating in an experiential leadership training process. Through this process, Indigenous Youth develop their own capacities, leadership, techniques and management styles, while teaching Conservation Practitioners how to facilitate a process that delivers local conservation leadership. Once the process has been piloted and tested, a toolkit will be published for global dissemination.

During the panel, project participants share their experience of the project and present the toolkit. We hope to generate interest in, and receive insights and feedback to improve, our indigenous-led Grassroots Leadership Programme.