OFAH conservation internships growing — and hiring!

The COVID-19 pandemic seriously impacted and even wiped out many field programs run by conservation agencies and non-government organizations like the OFAH.

That said, one positive outcome that arose from this upheaval has been a re-evaluation of our internships, which were originally created to provide early career opportunities for young conservationists coming out of school AND support our programs busy with projects out of the office — such as delivering field trips for classroom hatchery participants or monitoring invasive water soldier populations.

CHANGING LANDSCAPE

While our interns have always had occasional tasks that support our fish and wildlife policy biologists and our conservation program communications, the sudden lack of fieldwork in 2020 meant these roles become their primary assignments. To no one’s surprise, our interns were more than up for the job as undertaking tasks such as reviewing legislation and scientific literature on the impacts of lead fishing tackle and ammunition, the use of drones in hunting, fish and wildlife diseases, and so much more. They provided a significant boost to our communications efforts across the board, too, helping us coordinate updates on pandemic-related fishing and hunting access issues, as well as creating social media content for many of our programs.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

This past fall the OFAH’s Fish and Wildlife Department became the Policy and Programs Department and within under the same umbrella,we’ve added our stable of outreach programs into it. As we continue to hope for a full return to field programs in 2022, the demonstrated success of interns tackling policy and communications work, the addition of outreach programming duties to the interns’ job description, and the obvious benefit of having trained staff stay on longer, the OFAH management team felt it was time to move to longer internships.

STRENGTH IN PARTNERSHIP

Fortunately, we have great partners here at the OFAH – chief among them, the Fitzsimons Financial Group Inc. who immediately stepped up recently in support of extending the OFAH/Fitzsimons Financial Group Inc. Fish and Wildlife Conservation Internship to eight months. What had traditionally been a winter and spring term, running from January to early May, will now become a January to August term.

MORE INFORMATION

Check out the links below for more on our internships and an inside look on how to get job with the OFAH.

Conservation Intern Partnerships – Helping OFAH, Helping Young Conservationists

Jonny Nene looks back on his OFAH internship experience

An inside look on how to get a job at OFAH

Chris Robinson

Manager of Fish and Wildlife Conservation Programs

Chris has been with the OFAH, for the most part, since 2002. He worked first with the OFAH’s old Fisheries Research Unit, helping to get it started, before briefly straying back to MNRF to work on Walleye in the Kawarthas. He returned to the OFAH for the start of the Lake Ontario Atlantic Salmon Restoration Program, coordinating that through to 2018 when he moved on to become the Manager of Fish and Wildlife Conservation Programs. Chris has a B.Sc. from Guelph and a M.Sc. (on Muskellunge) from Trent. After Guelph he worked in various capacities with MNRF, largely out of the Glenora Fisheries Station on Lake Ontario, before joining the OFAH. In his spare time he is known for his support of the CFL, getting out-fished by his nephews, and being the most likely person to have a hardcopy of a file from fifteen years ago.