Our goal — to provide natural resource professionals who do not self-identify as a hunter with an understanding of the diverse values and important roles of hunting and its impact on conservation to ensure that hunting is considered a relevant and important component of wildlife conservation; not by creating more hunters but by creating a conservation workforce aware of the history, values, and roles of hunting in wildlife conservation.
Free and open discussion about culture, ethics, and emotion is an important part of the CLfT experience.
The Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation offers two hunting awareness and conservation education programs to natural resource agency professionals and one program to university students majoring in a natural resource field.
Our Conservation Leaders for Tomorrow (CLfT) in-person workshop is described below.
You can learn more about our two CLfT Online programs: Conservation & Hunting in America (C&HA), and Hunting for Conservation (HfC) under the "Programs" tab.
CLfT is a professional development program designed for leaders within the natural resource sciences. CLfT focuses on hunting awareness and conservation education among academic programs and government agencies. CLfT consists of 5-day program that blends interactive classroom discussion with field experiences. Workshop participants engage with leading natural resource professionals and conservationists in a highly interactive educational setting.
Today, more than half of the students graduating with wildlife and natural resource degrees and several agency professionals have never hunted and know little about it or the reasons why people hunt.
CLfT is not intended to recruit or train participants to be hunters. Instead, our objective is to provide the participant with insights into why hunting, and the sustainable use of wildlife, is important from biological, social, cultural, and economical standpoints and its role in conservation.
To achieve these objectives, the 5-day workshops blend interactive roundtable discussions. technical presentations and field exercises. CLfT instructors are veteran hunters and include wildlife conservation professionals, and university professors and staff.
The few days will provide career-building benefits that are invaluable. It also is a resume and character-building adventure that truly has a lifelong impact.
We feel it is important that natural resource professionals understand the roles, values, motivations, and satisfactions derived from hunting and the sustainable use of wildlife. Armed with this information agency professionals will be better prepared to manage wildlife effectively.
If you would like to learn more about CLfT please contact us at: info@clft.org.