Endangered Activism is a mother-daughter collaboration to explore education outside the classroom and learn about extinction and wildlife conservation solutions from local experts around the world.

We co-created this project to focus on field research storytelling, learn the best solutions in local conservation, and find creative solutions for storytelling in urban and youth communities that aren’t traditionally tied to conservation. We spent her 7th-grade year traveling for 14 months and immersing herself in field research around the world. Devon interviewed biologists, rangers, scientists, conservation leaders, and researchers in Namibia, Borneo, and Argentina about local solutions to the global problems of extinction and climate change. Returning home to Colorado, we visited a warehouse that stored the illegal animal goods seized at the US border. Rows of big cat carcasses, elephant tusks, rhino horn, and bags of pangolin scales. A warehouse proving that the money funding the extermination of wildlife linked back to the country we had left.

Devon’s focus on giving voice to the issue was on graphic novels and street art projects. We co-wrote the graphic novel, The Rosette, and brought Mariana Prieto on to illustrate it. We launched the street art project #WhatWeLose in collaboration with Mexican artist Diana Garcia, in Paris, Oxford, and Denver, Colorado.

Our journey was documented in its entirety, and we are now ready to transform our experiences into a coming-of-age documentary. This film not only showcases our field research but also highlights the use of street art as a unique storytelling medium. Now Devon is 20, and has returned to Namibia and Malawi to work directly with the biologists and field researchers she admired and met when she was twelve. She starts university to earn a degree in wildlife conservation, while continuing to spend as much time in the field studying big cats as possible.