Combining Conservation -, Visual – and Science Communication

Abstract

Jo: You're listening to Access 2 perspectives conversations. My name is Jo Havemann.We're here today with Abigail Dean. So, Abigail, welcome to the show. It's a great pleasure to have you here.Abigail: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Jo: Yeah. And we met quite recently in networking community. And again, I highly recommend anybody who is listening to any communities and not just one or two, but whatever interests you. So we have a shared interest in business development and purpose driven, that is. In the prep talk to this conversation, you mentioned the term, which was new to me, triple bottom line businesses whom you're aiming to serve as a web strategist, conceptualist, and designer with the services that you provide, which we came to learn more about. Maybe let's get started with getting to know you because you also have a research angle or you started as a researcher or considered a researcher's career and then figured that maybe entrepreneurship is more your thing. So how did this play out for you? Like, what was the trajectory in the past? Abigail: Originally, I went to College for fish, wildlife and conservation and global environmental sustainability. So I've always been very passionate about our natural world and protecting it. A lot of people who go down that degree path end up in the research field, which is where I thought I was going to end up.After College, I landed two incredible internships. So the first one was working on a sailing fleet, teaching sailors about sea turtles how to identify sea turtles, and then log their data for a citizen science project, which was gathering a bunch of data about where sea turtles hang out all across the Pacific Coast of Baja. That was incredible. So I kind of got more interested in conservation communication there rather than actually doing the research myself. I loved watching people's faces light up when we were talking about sea turtles or when they learned that they could be part of it, or when they were learning something that they maybe didn't think they would be able to learn about. Because sometimes science can feel like this elusive thing and this overwhelming thing to people who don't have scientific backgrounds. So that sparks my passion for conservation communications. And then I got a second internship in Hawaii. I was working on a marine rescue team, so we were working with the Hawaiian Monk seals, Seavers and sea turtles because they all kind of hang out on the beaches and hang out on the ground, which pose a lot of threats. And there's a lot of people and stray cats. And Hawaiian wildlife has a lot of struggles. But mainly what I ended up doing there was a lot of education work, talking to people on the beaches, talking to tourists about the endangered species, what they can do to help, what they shouldn't be doing. And after working with these incredible organizations, I started to notice that there was a disconnect between the incredible mission that they had and being able to communicate that to the general public. And I remembe...