Are you ready to take your conservation solution to the next level?

The Salazar Center’s Peregrine Accelerator champions and invests in ideas that contribute to national and global targets for biodiversity and climate, advance community wellbeing, and address environmental inequities and injustice.

Our accelerator not only funds promising conservation solutions but moves project teams beyond the barriers they face to successful implementation through tailored training, mentorship, and peer-learning opportunities. This model, in addition to helping project teams put their ideas into action faster and more effectively, also ensures effective conservation solutions—as well as emergent best practices, lessons learned, and opportunities for scaling and replicating effective work—are amplified through the Salazar Center’s larger network.

What is an Accelerator for Conservation Impact?

The Peregrine Accelerator provides seed funding to a cohort of up to 10 project teams per year, which then receive tailored mentorship, training, and support over six months. Accepted participants should expect to dedicate 2-3 hours per week over the six-month program, which includes workshops; one-on-one sessions with mentors; introductions to potential funders; and other curricular and networking elements within the cohort. Much of this content will be delivered virtually. The Salazar Center will convene all participants at least once during the cohort period, for which participants’ expenses will be covered by the program. At the end of the accelerator program, each team will have developed an actionable implementation plan and will be eligible for additional funding.

Specifically, each project team selected to participate in the accelerator cohort will receive:

• Up to $20,000 in seed funding to support team members’ participation and project start-up costs over the six-month cohort program
• Exposure to the Salazar Center’s network of funders and curated introductions to prospective funders
• An actionable implementation plan and evaluation strategy for the proposed conservation solution
• 1-1 mentorship from a strategically-recruited network of experts
• A community of other project teams in which participants can share knowledge, explore opportunities for partnership, and build a lasting community of practice that extends beyond the length of the program
• Opportunities to showcase learnings and share your expertise with a broader network of practitioners across North America through articles and multimedia resources co-created with the Salazar Center

Nests: Our priority transboundary landscapes

The Peregrine Accelerator cycles through target transboundary landscapes in North America—aka “nests”—on an annual basis.

Conservation efforts in each nest offer significant opportunity to contribute to national and global targets for biodiversity and climate change, to advance community wellbeing, and to address environmental inequities and injustice. Nests also demonstrate a strong track record of (or ample opportunity for) collaboration across borders, and they are well positioned to achieve impact as determined by conservation value, lack of attention, and need. Each nest is defined around shared ecology and a common socio-cultural ground, and boundaries are drawn to be binational, across a large enough region to bring together groups from two countries in a context where they might not otherwise interact.

The Salazar Center conducts extensive research to identify each nest, and then the Accelerator supports a diverse and complementary group of promising projects led by local rights- and stakeholders with a tailored, outcomes-oriented program that is responsive to each region’s ecological, cultural, and socioeconomic needs and opportunities.

In 2023, the pilot year of the program, the nest was the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Basin (link to 2023 Cohort); in 2025, it is the North Atlantic Transboundary Landscape (link to 2025 Cohort); and in 2026, it will be the Baja-Sonora region (link to Apply page). We will announce future nests in the coming years, before returning to the Rio Grand/Bravo Basin and beginning the cycle again.