- Brett Jenks ’89
Brett Jenks is a capitalist. He talks about franchising and leveraging and replicating strategies. But he’s not selling hamburgers or financial services or widgets.
Jenks ’89 is president and CEO of a nonprofit conservation organization named Rare, which applies business principles to its mission of engaging people at the grassroots to protect and even profit from their environments. His shareholders are the indigenous populations of biologically rich but threatened regions. His board is a blue-chip group of “utterly committed, conservation-minded people,” Jenks says, with stellar business and environmental credentials.
“Some people would shudder to hear this from a conservationist, but we’ve got a lot to learn from Starbucks, we’ve got a lot to learn from McDonalds, such as the ability to replicate successful processes,” he says. “We think of ourselves in part as a conservation franchisor, only the return on investment for us is that a local conservation organization gets successful.”
Rare employs 35 people, with an annual budget of $5.2 million, and is supported mainly by individuals and foundations, with some government grants. Conservationist and educator Wendy J. Paulson serves as chair; she is married to former Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Henry M. Paulson Jr., who was recently named secretary of the U.S. Treasury.
Last summer, investment manager Jeremy Grantham and his wife, Hannelore, a member of the Rare board, pledged $5 million to the organization to launch 170 of its “Pride” campaigns, using local managers and marketing techniques such as billboards, events, and pop songs to change destructive behavior in environmentally threatened communities. The money will leverage efforts in the same areas by larger organizations like the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Rare started life in the 1970s as the Rare Animal Relief Effort. But it no longer uses that name and eschews the image of a starry-eyed, save-the-whales organization. “Rare’s methods originate from private-sector practices, are measurement driven, and are geared for scalability and replication,” states an overview of the organization. Recognizing that approach, Fast Company magazine named Rare a recipient of its “Social Capitalist” awards in 2005 and 2006, honoring nonprofits that use business solutions to address social problems. It’s not just a do-gooder dedicated to solving biodiversity conservation, said Mark Vamos, the magazine’s editor. “It is a business-oriented organization with a vision worthy of imitation both in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.”
Much of the credit for building Rare can be given to Jenks, 39, who was recruited from a rural teaching post in Costa Rica.
Recruitment was also what brought Jenks to UMass Amherst. He was a lacrosse midfielder out of Maplewood, New Jersey. He and current Minutemen coach Greg Cannella received the first two scholarships given for lacrosse.
In his sunlit corner office in Arlington, Virginia, Jenks takes a moment to think back. He said he chose UMass Amherst mainly because of longtime lacrosse coach Richard F. “Goose” Garber who coached at UMass Amherst from 1955 to 1990 and inspired Garber Field. He is also the winningest coach in college lacrosse history.
UMass Amherst represented Jenks’s entrée to the wider world. As an English major and participant in the Commonwealth Scholars Program, “I had some pretty terrific professors who sort of helped me understand there is more to life than lacrosse,” he said.
“Brett was always a bright person and played that way on the field,” said Cannella, who still sees Jenks regularly. “We all knew how intellectual Brett was.”
The campus scene was instructive. Jenks was impressed by the diversity of opinions. “Whatever was going on in world affairs was right in the center of campus,” he remembers. “There was the pond, there was the Student Union, and then there was this clash of ideologies as expressed by young people. That was important.”
Students then were calling for American divestiture from investments in apartheid-era South Africa. Jenks’s curiosity was further piqued by a course on Third World journalism taught by Afro-American Studies professor David DuBois.
“I got interested in Third World economics and development, but in a cursory way,” Jenks said. “It was in the back of my mind when I left UMass. It certainly wasn’t something I knew I would someday do.”
Jenks meandered into journalism after graduating; he worked for a series of weekly newspapers in Hudson County, New Jersey. He moved to Boston and tried his hand at being an independent film producer, but burned out on the time commitment.
About that time he remembered a poster from his college days, from an organization known as WorldTeach, beckoning volunteers to developing countries. The nonprofit, non-governmental organization was founded by a group of Harvard students in 1986. It was looking for volunteers to teach in Costa Rica, and Jenks signed up.
The assignment was pivotal. Billeted with a Red Cross–issue blanket and a family of six, whose members slept together so that the new schoolteacher could have his own room in a house damaged by the 1991 Limon earthquake, “was probably the most transformational moment to date, other than having kids, in my life,” Jenks recalled. (Jenks’s wife, Jacky, is a 1988 UMass Amherst grad; they have two children, Benjamin, 10, and Emma, 7.)
While working for WorldTeach, he was asked by a conservationist affiliated with Rare in Costa Rica to help train local people as guides for ecotourism, which was gaining popularity at the time. Jenks drew from the methodology of an intensive French course he had taken at UMass Amherst and, using WorldTeach volunteers, drilled local farmers and fisher folk in English and natural history. Within 10 weeks, Jenks’s effort graduated its first class of nature guides.
- Your Vacation Can Help!
Rare works with the Mesoamerica Ecotourism Alliance (MEA). Ecotours provide direct benefits to the environment and to local and regional economies. Destinations include southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Activities include archaeology, birding, fly-fishing, kayaking, and SCUBA diving, among others. To find out more, visit MEA at www.travelwithmea.com.
Rare asked Jenks to join the organization and create an eco-tourism program. He left WorldTeach in 1995, and has been with Rare ever since, taking the helm in 2000.
“Conservation science has gotten us to the point that we generally understand what’s causing the loss of biodiversity, and it’s human activity,” says Jenks. He describes Rare’s mission with a missionary’s zeal: “Our theory of change, if you will, is that conservation is no longer a biological challenge, it’s social, it’s political, and it’s economic. If we can develop strategies that address those factors and we can develop a way to replicate those successful strategies, well we’re well on our way to making a huge impact in this field.”
