As Wild Tomorrow grows, we are excited to expand our work both inside and outside the reserve, including conservation education and development programs in our local Zulu community. To lead these initiatives, Wild Tomorrow created a brand new position for a Community Conservation Manager. We are delighted to welcome Aphiwe Notshaya to the role, leading our community education programs. Welcome Aphiwe! Get to know more about her in this interview below.

In South Africa, education opportunities are deeply inequitable, and children in rural areas are falling behind. Additionally, many people living both in cities and in rural towns are not able to fully appreciate their own country’s amazing wildlife with access to wildlife reserves out of reach. Most have never seen an elephant, lion, rhino, or giraffe - perhaps only behind a fence. At Wild Tomorrow, we’ve always believed in the importance of education and equitable access to wildlife and wild places to connect young hearts and minds to wildlife and nature.

With this in mind, we are excited to be able to expand our community program and are delighted to welcome Aphiwe Notshaya as our first Community Conservation Manager based at Wild Tomorrow’s Conservation Center in South Africa. In this role, Aphiwe will be able to lead our community programs together with community leaders. She is already hard at work developing internal educational materials for new staff, getting to know the teachers at the creche, our green mambas, rangers, and planning our community development program including environmental education initiatives for local kids.

Aphiwe will work with community leaders to identify community needs and outreach opportunities — working to raise awareness of Wild Tomorrow’s work and vision, and the overarching importance of biodiversity conservation for current and future generations.

Get to know Aphiwe!

Aphiwe is a warm and welcoming team member, bringing her hugs, enthusiasm and creativity to the office daily at the Wild Tomorrow Conservation Center. Growing up, Aphiwe Notshaya was a little environmentalist: she loved trees and soon developed an interest in how to protect nature. After graduating high school, she followed her green heart to pursue a career in conservation, obtaining a BA in Environmental Management in 2020 from the University of South Africa at the Durban campus. While studying, she worked as an education volunteer guide teaching basic marine ecology at uShaka Seaworld in Durban, where she also fell in love with reptiles and is now a proud advocate for snakes (her favourite snake is the ‘dramatic’ Rinkhals snake, which plays dead when threatened!).

Before joining the Wild Tomorrow team, she was working for the Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs, developing education and awareness programs, and interventions for the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Aphiwe believes that education is key to ensuring support for conservation, and that working with communities is crucial to achieving this goal.

Climate change remains an issue close to Aphiwe’s heart and it’s exciting that Aphiwe can bring this passion and experience to Wild Tomorrow’s work in wildlife conservation, protecting and restoring habitat — an important nature-based solution for climate action!

Learn more about Aphiwe in the interview below!

*Aphiwe got straight to work at Wild Tomorrow, helping to plant trees for our sand forest restoration project.*

Why is Wild Tomorrow Fund's mission (saving wildlife and wild places) important to you? There are so many wild spaces that are degraded and are suffering from habitat loss and I feel that what Wild Tomorrow is doing to restore critically endangered sand forests is really important especially in the face of climate change. Forest restoration is one of the ways to create carbon sinks and mitigate climate change but also to indirectly help thousands of people that will benefit from these restored spaces and protected wildlife

How are your skills helping save wildlife? Through storytelling, which is one of my skills I am able to connect people to nature and create an environment that enables them to think differently about co-existence with wildlife. Through my creativity I am able to design educational material that makes an impact and resonates with people.

What is your favorite wild moment? I had just started working with Wild Tomorrow and was on a game drive with the April group of international volunteers. We stopped to see a lion in the bushes and it was such a precious moment because it was my first time seeing a lion and honestly it was such a special moment especially since we could not take a picture so you just had to be there and enjoy it.

Why is education so important? Through education I have the opportunity to teach people about how their actions impact the natural world and how they can use resources sustainably. Education allows me to inform people about endangered spaces and the importance of conservation. Being Wild Tomorrow’s Community Conservation Manager means I have the privilege to work with communities to protect resources, to help them in the face of climate change and to build a bridge between conservation and communities.

What do you like to do when you’re not at work? I love reading and catching up on series and I bake, so I love testing out new recipes.

Welcome Aphiwe to the Wild Tomorrow team! We can’t wait to see the impact you will make.

If you’d like to support our community programs, please consider making a donation here to our Education Fund - it is with these funds that we are able to support existing community programs and the new initiatives that Aphiwe will develop!

WELCOME TO APHIWE, OUR NEW COMMUNITY CONSERVATION MANAGER

"In the end we will conserve only what we love,

we will love only what we understand,

and we will understand only what we are taught."