BBCA Moving Toward a More Equitable Future
Joining the Board are Sophia Hernandez (top left), Roberto Lujan (top right), Aimee Roberson (bottom right), and Oscar Rodriguez (bottom left).
Our strategic vision guides BBCA toward projects that engage communities in the region’s conservation challenges—you may have noticed this direction as we’ve been announcing our latest work. We’re creating opportunities for education, dialogue, and public participation; looking to find solutions informed by community feedback; and are working with intentionality to become a more equitable organization.
As we move forward in these ways, it’s important that we lead our organization by sharing power with communities in the Big Bend. Simply put, if the strategic vision of BBCA is working on conservation issues directly with communities, then our leadership (and our staff) need to share power with and become more representative of the communities we serve.
This is the moment to take stock—to evaluate the strengths of our current team and do the work to be more inclusive. It’s of vital importance to ask the questions—Who in the Big Bend’s communities are not represented among our leadership? How can we bring that representation into the highest level of the organization, so that we can share this power to make decisions aligned with our strategic vision and our values?
This requires reflection and we began with two group dialogues centered on race-equity in the Big Bend. Throughout the region, stakeholders who self-identified as Indigenous, Latinx, Mexican-American, and Hispanic came together for a facilitated discussion about race and the region’s challenges, especially at the intersection of the environment and conservation. Our goal with these discussions was to hear directly from these important communities about the challenges they were facing and begin the process of understanding the ways in which BBCA could move forward with justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and access—front and center—in everything we do.
After these dialogues, the BBCA Board came together to reflect on their identities, skill sets, and places of residency—asking ourselves how we currently represented and how well-represented was the region in our Board? Our leadership was overwhelmingly white; many had conservation backgrounds; all had valuable skills to contribute; most were similar in age; and all were living in Brewster County, Jeff Davis County, or Austin.
This offered us an incredible opportunity to ask ourselves where we needed more perspectives in our decision making and the answers were clear—Latinx and Indigenous voices, especially important given the region’s history and demographics. Residents of Presidio County, which is just as large and populated as Brewster County and a critical part of the landscape in which the organization operates. Parents; teachers; historians; growers—helping fill large gaps in knowledge and experience given we are working on school programs, regional food security, and culture is one of our four program areas.
Today, we are incredibly excited to announce the addition of four members to our Board of Directors who represent so many of these perspectives and more; joining the Board are Sophia Hernandez, Roberto Lujan, Aimee Roberson, and Oscar Rodriguez. We’ve been fortunate to work with each one of these incredible individuals over the past year and we are grateful they will be helping lead the organization into its future.
Please welcome Sophia, Roberto, Aimee, and Oscar and read more about their accomplishments on the About page of our website.
We are looking forward to always reflecting and asking ourselves these questions, so that BBCA continues on the path toward equitable practice and environmental justice in the Big Bend.