Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dave Johnson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Dave, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I am a zookeeper. This career has kept me very engaged for the last forty years. With this passion came an interest to write children’s books and take people on conservation initiatives. We started the Katie Adamson Conservation Fund in 2014 to honor one of our fallen colleagues. Katie had been involved with our zoo in Denver for 12 years. She had started as a zoo crew teen and then kept with the program. Cancer took her way too soon. We did this in her honor to fuse the cultures of the world and protect wildlife. It has been a wonderful way to involve people with our mission to educate and empower folks from around the world.

Dave, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Dave Johnson and I am a pachyderm zookeeper out in Denver, Colorado. I have been here working with the elephants, rhinos, and hippos for the last 25 years. During this time we created the Katie Adamson Conservation Fund to help engage the zookeepers, volunteers, and local students with wildlife conservation. I have my fourth children’s book coming out this summer that will be translated into Spanish, Swahili, and Nepalese. We take our people all over the planet to help out with human/wildlife conflict initiatives and to support conservation connections.

I have had this animal passion for my entire life and it all started when I pretended to be an ostrich for about four days when I was four years old. This led to my wildlife biology degree and animal career. I have never outgrown my ostrich boy roots.

Now we are involved with a community that includes 24 countries and countless species. It has been life changing.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

During my career I have had definite ups and downs in the zookeeper field. It is a hard job with lots of physical labor and an ever changing work place that makes you hardened and versatile depending on the management style changes. If you work somewhere for 25 years, that means that the corporate environment changes with new leadership. I lost some wonderful support system colleagues who were replaced by new personnel who were less than willing to work with a zookeeper on such influential initiatives. Instead of building a positive environment for staff, they elected to place barriers and stifle creativity and networking. Instead of working with the zoo, I had to move my efforts outside of the zoo walls and build something with the community instead of doing this as part of my career. I had to change everything and create a new focus on a non-profit. The lessons I learned from these poor leaders allowed me to be accepting and fluid. Instead of constructing silos we decided to work with all of the community and open everything to collaboration. It has been a wonderful thing to grow and be able to use the zoo as a template on how not to treat partners and collaborators.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

We started to do some of the community work including children’s books and global travel in 2010. It became something very special to our animal community. Then in 2014 we lost Katie Adamson to cancer. She had been a zoo crew teen and then a zoo explorer scout. By the time she was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma she was a freshman at CSU and studying wildlife biology. She was also an intern in the primate department and finally getting paid. She was wanting to be a zookeeper with us and hoped to travel to Nepal with our team. She died in June. Instead of this breaking us apart, we pivoted into a new role. We went to her parents and asked if we could use her name to create a non-profit that would share her passion with the world. The Katie Adamson Conservation Fund was born that summer when she died. Her parents are now fully engaged and go on these trips to see what her daughter helped create. This shocking negative event in my history helped to create a positive global outpouring on love and connectivity.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kacf.eco
• Facebook: Katie Adamson Conservation Fund