At Rafiki, conservation is not a side program. It is the ethical ground of the entire experience.

Students do not only learn about conservation. They stand inside the questions it requires:

What keeps a watershed clean? What does a keystone species need in order to persist? What conditions allow recovery — or prevent it?

Path of the Tapir / ASANA Costa Rica

Rafiki works within the larger conservation landscape of the Corredor Biológico Paso de la Danta — the Path of the Tapir Biological Corridor — in partnership with ASANA (Asociación Amigos de la Naturaleza del Pacífico Central y Sur).

This corridor exists to protect habitat connectivity for Baird’s Tapir and the wider ecological systems that support life across Costa Rica’s central-southern Pacific region.

Through private land stewardship, education, and on-the-ground awareness work, Rafiki and ASANA contribute to a shared effort to change how people understand and value tapirs — not as distant symbols, but as living indicators of landscape health.

Students encounter this work directly. They study habitat needs, connectivity, and the relationship between protected private land and larger biological corridors. Conservation becomes tangible because they are standing inside one of the places that makes corridor conservation possible.

Intergenerational Knowledge & the Living Classroom

Our conservation education work is also rooted in the belief that protecting land requires protecting knowledge.

The Savegre Valley holds ecological understanding carried across generations — knowledge of water, forest, plants, animals, and relationship to place. Rafiki’s educational mission includes the intergenerational transmission of that understanding through youth programs, field learning, storytelling, and filmmaking tools that help young people observe carefully, remember deeply, and carry care forward.

This is conservation as cultural continuity as well as ecological protection.

When students learn how a living system works, and when they are given time to fall into relationship with it, indifference becomes much harder to sustain.

That is one of the most durable forms of protection available.