Born in the Cowichan Valley, Glenn grew up on remote Nootka Island in the traditional territory of the Mowachaht First Nation. Glenn was blessed to spend much of his childhood and adolescence living off grid on the wild Pacific coast. His parents are avid outdoors people who instilled in him a reverence for nature and wildlife. His early education was a combination of home-schooling as well as time spent in a one-room school where a small group of kindergarten to grade 7 students learned together. The education that continues to resonate the most for him however was the one he received outside of the classroom in particular from the Mowachaht whose careful stewardship of terrestrial and marine resources sustained their economic and cultural life for millennia. He later went on to earn a BA in Communications from McGill University in Montréal and then a Masters in Public Administration from ICU in Tokyo, Japan as a Rotary Peace Fellow. Prior to being awarded a two-year Rotary Peace Fellowship in 2009 Glenn served as Executive Director of Pacific Peoples Partnership, a Victoria based international development NGO that works with major donors and partners across the Asia-Pacific on rights-based sustainable development initiatives. At the same time he served on the board of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, helping to ensure that investments of Canadian public and private funded international development assistance reflected the very best practices and ethical standards. Since graduating from ICU in 2011 Glenn has led a multi-country anti-corruption program in the Pacific region for Transparency International and since 2015 has served as the executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute in the Democratic Republic of Congo where he leads the multi-stakeholder Conservation Action Plan for Great Apes aimed at conserving critically endangered chimpanzees, gorillas and their habitats while also working to achieve improved health, education and livelihood outcomes in communities that have been plagued by over 2 decades of conflict that has claimed the lives of some 5 million people and left many more displaced and traumatized. It is challenging to teach people to care about the environment when everyday living is so difficult. Why should people care about the extinction of chimpanzees when one chimpanzee can fetch a $25,000 price tag in China? The JGI is building trust by investing in local communities, building schools and medical clinics. They are teaching skills in farming and animal husbandry, and developing small local industries, such as creating sanitary napkins from local products. They are connecting kids to nature, by taking them into the rainforest and teaching them about the rainforest and wildlife. Twice a year 650 children are taken through this program. In addition, they have a youth leadership program "Roots and Shoots" which involves 5,000 youth, and encourages them to work on problems in their own communities affecting people, animals or the environment. Roots and Shoots was founded by Jane Goodall in 1991, and has local chapters in over 140 countries with over 8000 local groups worldwide that involve nearly 150,000 youth. . The Jane Goodall Institute works with a diverse consortium of local and international partners combining conservation science and a holistic, community centered and conflict sensitive approach that recognizes that unless the long term well being of human populations are secure conservation initiatives are unlikely to succeed. |