In August 2018, Ryan Hawley, the son of Rhosa William Hawley of Ant Atoll, Pohnpei (a OneReef partner community), was awarded the Nia Tero Young Leaders Fellowship Program, which fosters young leaders who will take on key roles in conservation. OneReef worked to get Ryan the fellowship as part of our commitment to nurture and mentor community stewards and leaders for community based conservation. To accomplish conservation that endures, we need conservation leaders in the younger generation in addition to our long term agreements. Through the Nia Tero fellowship, Ryan will make important connections and learn more about effective conservation from other young community leaders, and from Nia Tero’s partners, including the Mulago Foundation and MIT Media Lab. That in turn will make Ryan a multiplier factor for conservation in his generation and the generation younger than him, not just in Pohnpei but in the entire Micronesia region. As a first step towards accomplishing this, Ryan made a trip to San Francisco in September 2018, to meet with the other Nia Tero fellows (from Arctic Circle, Cook Island, Guyana and others). They all attended the big Global Climate Action Summit held in San Francisco. Then they visited the MIT Media Lab where they heard about technologies that may be useful to them for surveillance, for monitoring human activities and for monitoring the environment. Then Ryan visited OneReef scientific partner, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, with OneReef CEO Chris LaFranchi, to meet with key people there, including the Chair of the Directors Council, to talk about our growing institutional collaboration and work in the Pacitfic region. Ryan is scheduled to return to the Bay Area in February, 2019 for the next step in the Nia Tero Fellowship Program.
