Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Clark.
Hi Matt, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Eleven years ago, my wife, Abby, our sons, Rowan and Quillan (then 7 and 5 years old) and I moved from the United States to Loja, a small city in the southern Ecuadorian Andes where I started a job with Nature and Culture International (NCI). Abby and I saw it as a way for our family to experience a new culture and for our boys to learn Spanish. It was a bit of a risk. We didn’t know anybody there and we weren’t sure how long we’d stay. It turned out to be the move of a lifetime. We’ve been back in the US for seven years now (we were in Loja for three and a half years and yes, happily, our boys are fluent in Spanish). I’m now the head of NCI and I love it more than ever.
NCI is a non-profit that protects large intact forests in the Tropical Andes and western Amazon (plus a small but mighty program in northern Mexico). These forests are home to jaw-droppingly beautiful plants and animals and store massive amounts of carbon critical to combating climate change. We do this work in close collaboration with the Indigenous and other rural peoples who live in and depend on these ecosystems.
What I love about Nature and Culture International is that it weaves together three of the longest-running threads of my professional career, namely biodiversity conservation, Latin America, and Indigenous rights.
My love for Latin America began in college when I took a year off, and among other things, volunteered for several months at a Catholic orphanage in Colima, Mexico where I learned to speak Spanish like a five-year-old street urchin. Post college, I spent two years Honduras as a Peace Corps Volunteer, then got a master’s degree in environmental management. One of my first jobs after my master’s program was working for the Confederated Umatilla Tribes (one of the Columbia River tribes) to support their treaty fishing rights via a salmon restoration project.
Depending on the day, NCI feels like the logical evolution of where my career was headed or a happy accident. Maybe it was both.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I struggled for months out of graduate school to land my first conservation job, receiving my share of rejection letters before I was finally hired. So I feel for young people who are discouraged by the current job market. And I pre-date AI. Things are harder now than 25 years ago when I was starting out. I don’t have any great advice for job seekers except to volunteer for things you care about and to build your network (most of my jobs have come from networking)
The non-profit sector is facing some headwinds currently. With recent cuts to federal funding, competition for other sources of revenue has increased, making fundraising more challenging. We at NCI are working hard to raise the funds needed to support our work and maximize our impact.
There are political and economic challenges in the Latin American countries where NCI works. There are increasing fires in the Andes and Amazon, which destroy millions of acres of habitat every year. Climate change is making this worse. Illegal gold mining is rampant in the Amazon, driven by drug cartels.
Accelerating climate change is driving the extinction of more and more plants and animals. Climate change recently surpassed land use change as the world’s leading cause of biodiversity loss. NCI’s work protecting large landscapes is more important than ever.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My job responsibilities are pretty typical for the Executive Director of a non-profit organization. I oversee NCI’s staff and coordinate closely with our board of directors. I do a lot of fundraising and oversee strategic planning and program implementation. The skills I have that perhaps aren’t typical of every non-profit: I’m bilingual in English and Spanish and very familiar with Latin American culture.
I’m proud of Nature and Culture International as an organization that strives always to treat the local communities with whom we work as equal partners. To make a lasting impact, conservation needs to meet the needs of the people who live in and around these remarkable ecosystems.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
The best part of my job is the time I get to spend in Latin America, enjoying the wonderful people and the amazing plants and animals we are blessed to share this planet with. Nature is my spiritual sustenance. I was recently in Brazil with a friend. Among other things, we saw a baby tapir, two crab-eating foxes digging up a whip-tail lizard for dinner, a quartet of rheas, toucans and macaws galore, and maned wolf and puma tracks going every which way. That’s what makes me happy: being outdoors and soaking up the nearly infinite variety of life around me. And knowing that I’m part of it. A small part of it, yes, but part of an interconnected whole.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.natureandculture.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/naturecultureinternational/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NatureCultureInternational
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/naturecultureinternational/
Image Credits
Matt Clark
