Through my several years of working with CAN, they have offered me hands-on experiences to improve my skills and knowledge of collaborative environmental conservation and food security. At the same time, their unique action education program works along side farmers in Central America and Mexico so that my learning experience also contributed to improved livelihoods for small-scale family farms. I am particularly excited about their commitment to on-going participatory research so that programs are constantly evolving just as the global and local socio-ecological process do on the ground.