The most worthwhile thing in my opinion about working for a nature conservation charity is being able to share our learning and in turn learn from others. For over 10 years, I managed volunteers surveying farmland for the Volunteer & Farmer Alliance (V&FA) project.

In its later years, the project was funded by EU LIFE+ - supporting its UK wide spread and providing us with funding to attend many agricultural shows (and far more!), in order to meet and talk to many, many more farmers. Towards the end of the project we held a conference in Brussels, in order to showcase our work, hear first hand from volunteers, farmers and staff who had taken part in the various projects that had grown out of V&FA, including the export of the project to Sweden.

From our conference came invitations to attend others the first from the Europarc Federation, so off I went to Hungary in October 2013 to Europarc's 40th Annual Conference to do just that. The focus of the conference was volunteering – how to expand, support and encourage the gift of volunteering across special protected areas across Europe and beyond. Delegates were particularly interested in how the RSPB manages to recruit and retain so many volunteers, the benefits it brings to both wildlife and people in the context of lifelong learning, and the way people are encouraged to care and spread the message to others. The conference had over 270 delegates from Europe and further afield, and gave us the opportunity to build relationships with people from Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Hungary, New Zealand and Australia.

The main lesson to bring home - cultural differences across Europe greatly influence the availability of local skilled, committed volunteers – we are extremely lucky in the UK to have such passionate caring and committed people; which is mirrored in The Netherlands but not so much in Poland or Italy – where instilling care of nature is hard. There simply isn’t recognition of the decrease in biodiversity over time if you live within a national park, for example, and many of their volunteers are residential, often hailing from other countries. It was wonderful to meet UK people who had been volunteers for the V&FA and spoke very highly of the project. My presentation at the conference was followed up with an article in the Federation’s annual journal, Insight mailed to over 400 members across Europe.

The second opportunity to share and learn came with an invitation to present a case study of the project at an EU LIFE+ conference in Seville in November 2013 - organised by the managers of EU LIFE+ project “Conservacion y gestion en lad Zomas de Especial Proteccion par alas Aves Esteparias de Andalucia”. This was a conference with several case studies of EU LIFE+ projects, all with a common theme of protecting birds on farmland/steppe landscapes, based in Spain and Portugal and again sharing best practice amongst conservationists, farmers, students and politicians.

Lessons learnt here were about similarities of the challenges farmers face in the EU community. As in Britain, the farmer’s focus is production, yield and sustainability in a changing climate. Many in Spain are not aware of environmental subsidies, and are yet to recognise the wide benefits of a wildlife rich landscape, in terms of biodiversity and eco-tourism. The overwhelming benefit of attending both conferences was the ability to meet people face to face and share information – to be present and visible to other nature conservation organisations across the world – something I feel we need to do more of in the future. If we are working face to face with farmers to save nature, then why not with other organisations on a global scale?