Annual Reports: TNC Africa’s Year in Review is a big-picture annual thank you for our dedicated supporters that says, essentially, “We couldn’t do it without you. Thanks for being part of our team.” Each issue features a number of stories that, together, provide a look at the conservation progress we’ve made during the past year.
Bead by Bead
When the women of BeadWORKS gather together, beading needles in hand, conversation humming, strands of thread rising and falling, up and around, forward and back, each colorful design emerges slowly, meticulously, bead by bead. This is a community in motion, a collective force for good.
The creative talents of these women support their families and help boost local engagement in conservation. And thanks to Joanna Brown, a TNC Africa Council member and long-time TNC supporter, their handiwork has found a global market.
When she first volunteered in 2015 to help strengthen BeadWORKS—a microenterprise program of TNC-supported Northern Rangelands Trust in northern Kenya—her own life was forever changed.
“These women have had such a huge impact on me,” says Joanna, who picked up and moved to Kenya for a year, sharing her sales and marketing expertise as a Colorado bookstore owner and forging deep bonds with many of the women and their families.
Since then, Joanna, who is also a member of TNC’s Africa Affinity Group for Women and Girls, has returned to Kenya several times each year, sometimes joined by her husband, Stuart Brown, who is a TNC volunteer leader in Africa, Colorado, Alaska, and globally. Stuart credits his grandmother, who helped found TNC’s Kentucky chapter, with his passion for conservation. “She put an appreciation for nature directly into my DNA,” he says, recalling their Sunday walks through the woods. It’s an appreciation he and Joanna have passed on to their four children.
The Brown family has traveled and lived around the world, and their support for TNC reflects their commitment to the idea that we need to think big, beyond our own borders. “It’s a new mindset,” says Stuart, noting that TNC’s science-based priorities mean donors can have an impact in the places that matter most—including in Kenya, where they recently made a $1 million matching gift to support the country’s 2030 conservation goals.
It’s an effort with the potential to be part of what Stuart calls “the biggest success in conservation history.” These days, whenever the Browns return to northern Kenya they are greeted like family. That idea—that we are all family and share the same home—is precisely what has powered the Browns’ philanthropy and conservation leadership. Like the artisans, who work with patience and painstaking purpose, bead by bead, we must all come together to design a more beautiful future for our planet, our home.