IEWG Mentoring Program
IEWG Mentoring Program
The Society for Conservation Biology’s Impact Evaluation Working Group (SCB IEWG) is launching the fourth edition of its mentoring program to support people in their journey to learn and apply conservation impact evaluation methods.
Interested in being part of the mentoring program?
To participate in the mentoring program, please complete this form by November 17, 2025. We are especially looking for potential mentors interested in helping learning mentees!
This is the fourth edition of the IEWG mentoring program, and we strive to form about 10 pairs of mentor-mentees. You can apply to the mentoring program even if you are not yet a member of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB). The selected pairs will be contacted shortly after the submission deadline.
If you have any questions or difficulties, please contact Elías Cisneros at elias.cisneros@utdallas.edu.
For Mentors
To be eligible as a mentor, you need to have completed at least one impact evaluation of a conservation intervention and be willing to dedicate a portion of your time to discuss and provide advice to a learning mentee. The mentor does not need to be an experienced researcher or an expert on a broad range of impact evaluation methods! The mentor can be expected to play different roles, such as guiding the mentee to access key resources and people, providing a trusted source of feedback to consolidate a research plan, or coaching the mentee to reach a specific goal.
Being a mentor is an opportunity to learn about cool new projects and develop your leadership and management skills! It is a good preparation for the skills needed to supervise students, and it can also help expose academic researchers to the needs of conservation practitioners.
The mentor can advise the mentee by guiding them in their career paths, exploring networking opportunities, understanding the challenges and opportunities of using impact evaluation to inform conservation policy, assessing the feasibility of research ideas, or suggesting the relevant literature and other resources to consolidate their research plan. If both parties are interested, the mentoring program can also be a first step toward a more formalized collaboration or co-publication.
A mentor is not a substitute for a supervisor, a co-author, a training provider, or a consultant, but each pair can decide if and how they want to follow up or formalize their collaboration. A mentee is not a research assistant, but a mentor-mentee pair can jointly decide to work more closely together.
For Mentees
Mentees can be conservation practitioners, project managers, students, researchers, or anyone who has started learning about conservation impact evaluations. They may have no research background or may already have taken courses on impact evaluation and/or causal inference. To be eligible as a mentee, applicants must be preparing the design or analysis of an impact evaluation of a conservation intervention. Each mentee will be paired with a researcher familiar with impact evaluation approaches based on shared interests and availability. The mentee should prepare goals about what they want to achieve during the mentoring program while accepting that the mentor may be unable to support all the goals. Plans may include learning specific methods, understanding technical literature, improving confidence, discussing career development.
The paired mentees/mentors will be encouraged to arrange a virtual meeting to introduce each other, understand the mentee’s needs, and discuss how often they want to meet (e.g., 3 or 4 times over 6 months). The suggested duration of the program is about 6 months, but the paired mentees/mentors are free to define their frequency and duration based on their availability and interests.