Group Solutions facilitated a series of regional workshops to gather input from the cooperative community on blueprint development and improvement and provide guidance to the project team on how best to balance Blueprint improvement, support for conservation projects and promotion. More than 400 people from over 100 different organizations have actively participating in its development.
User feedback from SALCC has enabled the Southease Conservation Blueprint team to incorporate useful data elements into an evolving spatial conservation planning framework. An iterative process of stakeholder input, rapid prototyping, testing and validation guided development of the blueprint was established.
The resulting product, Blueprint 2.1, released in August 2016, is a totally data-driven plan based on terrestrial, freshwater, marine, and cross-ecosystem indicators. It uses the current condition of those indicators to prioritize the most important areas for natural and cultural resources across the South Atlantic geography.
The Blueprint is supporting new levels of insight, cooperation and conservation funding.
Group Solutions has continued to support the Steering Committee and implementation team with project management meeting, process design and support of additional stakeholder workshops to guide development of Blueprint 2.2.
In April of 2017 a 6-city listening session tour was completed to better understand the strengths and priority improvements of the Southeast conservation blueprint with staff and stakeholders. Workshop participants provided additional guidance on their preferences for balancing staff time between continued blueprint improvement, support for existing conservation projects and promotion of the blueprint to new users.
Post-session feedback on the sessions has been consistently positive on the process, effective facilitation and Blueprint product usefulness.
View the latest iteration of the Southeast Conservation Blueprint