Building Resilience: A Message from our CEO and Board Chair
October 28, 2020
Excerpted from our 2019-20 Annual Report
This past year has been a year like no other. COVID-19 has reshaped our society and affected all of us. The renewed calls for racial and social justice have caused many to question fundamental pillars of our society. And to see such an early and powerful wildfire season in California and across the West has been another reminder of the changing climate we can expect and the importance of our work. Through it all, Point Blue has stayed focused on our important mission: developing, testing, and implementing climate-smart conservation solutions. And we’ve been able to do so thanks to your support and the resilience we’ve built into this organization.
The word “resilience” can mean different things. In the context of climate change, we often talk about building resilience into our coastlines, our forests, and other ecosystems so that they can withstand both a steadily warming climate as well as “shocks to the system” in the form of extreme weather events. In many cases, that work is ongoing and informed by monitoring how a system responds to change and adjusting the “resilience strategy” along the way.
As an organization, Point Blue has built resilience into our action plans, our operations, and our partnerships over the half-century we have been advancing our conservation science. For us, resilience isn’t just about maintaining our approaches and activities at the existing level. We’ve looked at all of this year’s challenges as opportunities to innovate and explore new solutions (see page 14 for some examples). We know the post-pandemic world won’t look the same, and we know that racial injustice is a complex problem that will take dedication to begin addressing. We know that climate change will continue to affect us in predictable as well as unexpected ways, and we believe that we’re now better positioned than ever before to tackle the big challenges ahead.
In this year’s Annual Impact Report (covering the most recent fiscal year: April 1, 2019–March 31, 2020) you’ll find stories from each of our strategic initiatives, as well as other notable facts and numbers from the past year. Of course, this is just a small sample of the work our amazing team has done over the past year, and we encourage you to explore our website to learn more about the scope of our work. The two of us could not be prouder of the accomplishments of the Point Blue staff and their ability to thrive in difficult and changing environments. We are deeply honored to have the support of the Point Blue community—without you, none of our work would be possible.
Sincerely,
Manuel J. Oliva
CEO
Geoffrey Gordon-Creed
Chair, Board of Directors