Jessica Brown’s work focuses on stewardship of bio-cultural landscapes, community engagement in conservation, and governance of protected areas. She is Executive Director of the New England Biolabs Foundation, an independent, private foundation that provides small grants to community-based conservation projects in selected countries in Central America, South America and Africa. The Foundation supports stewardship of Sacred National Sites in many of these countries. She chairs the Protected Landscapes Specialist Group of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), and has worked in countries of the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, Andean South America, Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Jessica served as Senior Vice President for International Programs with the Quebec-Labrador Foundation (QLF) and currently consults with the UNDP/Global Environmental Facility Small Grants Programme and its Community Management of Protected Areas for Conservation initiative. She is Chair of the governing board of Terralingua, and serves on the boards of International Funders for Indigenous Peoples and New England International Donors. She holds degrees from Brown University and Clark University. Recent publications include The Protected Landscape Approach: Linking Nature, Culture and Community, a special issue of the journal, Management of Environmental Quality (Traditional Agricultural Landscapes and Community Conserved Areas) a special issue of the journal, Conservation and Society (Conservation as if People Also Mattered: Policy and Practice of Community-based Conservation) and the launch of a new series on Values of Protected Landscapes and Seascapes.
