A toast to Jane Goodall, one year later.
That isn't apple juice
On the last night of Climate Week NYC, the Jane Goodall Institute USA gathered its community in a gallery on Madison Avenue and handed every guest a small glass of something amber.
The reception, called An Evening of Conversation and Hope, took place at Arader Galleries on Sept. 24. A week before the first anniversary of Jane Goodall's death on Oct. 1, 2025, the evening was built less around grief than around the question of what to do next.
Anna Rathmann, executive director of JGI USA, shared with a line Jane said often, a reminder of Jane’s focus on the future:
Together we can, together we will, together we must change the world.
A consummate observer of nature and people
Jane arrived at Gombe in 1960 with no formal training in the field she would go on to revolutionize. That turned out to matter. She watched chimpanzees strip leaves from a twig and fish termites out of a mound, and she reported what she saw. Rather than reinforcing what "the field" believed, she showed what tool use meant and who was capable of it, opening our eyes and minds in the process.
The same habit shaped her conservation work. Alice Macharia, JGI USA's vice president of Africa programs, traced that to Tacare, JGI's community-led approach, which began in the villages around Gombe in the 1990s on another revolutionary premise: the people living alongside the forest are the ones who decide what happens to it, so the work starts by asking them. JGI now develops and implements those strategies across chimpanzee ranges in Africa, supporting individual communities in their long work of stewardship.
Community-led conservation has since become the default language of the sector. It was a minority position when Jane began arguing for it, and she reached it the same way she reached everything else, by observing first and concluding second.
Hope as a practice, not a mood
Oona Spaeth exemplifies making hope through action. A second-year student at Columbia University studying climate and sustainability, she serves on the JGI USA Roots & Shoots Youth Council. Jane founded Roots & Shoots in 1991 with a group of secondary school students in Dar es Salaam who sat on her porch and told her they felt powerless against what was happening around them. She listened, and then disagreed. Each group that forms now picks three projects, one for people, one for animals and one for the environment, which is the whole method: pick something in front of you and do it. Roots & Shoots runs in more than 60 countries.
That is the part of Jane's legacy easiest to underestimate. She spent the last decades of her life on the road roughly 300 days a year, talking to people about reasons to keep going, and she was careful to describe hope as something built out of evidence and effort rather than temperament.
Why ASU was there
ASU's Conservation Futures Academy (CFA) team attended as guests and growing partners of JGI. Jane's notebooks from 60 years at Gombe are housed at ASU's Institute of Human Origins, in the same building as the Rob Walton School of Conservation Futures. Building on that history, we are making deeper connections: JGI's vice president of conservation science, Lilian Pintea, is also a professor of practice in the school.
CFA finished its first year this fall with more than 30 courses developed and more than 1,500 enrollments, built with conservation organizations that shape what practitioners actually need to know. The method is not original to ASU; it descends fairly directly from the argument Jane spent 60 years making, that the people doing the work hold knowledge the institution does not, and that the institution's first job is to listen for it.
Everyone in that gallery had been changed by her work, most of them without ever having met her. That is a global legacy.
Franklin Moore, who chairs the JGI USA board, gave the toast, and he told the room not to mistake what was in the glass. That isn't apple juice. Jane kept a whiskey at hand for those meaningful conversations that dig into the big issues and build our connections and our commitments. This reception captured that spirit and the deep connections were palpable.
The glasses went up, clinked, we sipped. The conversation kept going around a few tears, while we turned back to putting hope into action.
Lexine Hansen is senior global partnership manager for conservation and sustainability at Arizona State University, where she helped launch Conservation Futures Academy. She builds partnerships with the organizations whose people do conservation work every day. Her career has run in and alongside government, bringing philanthropies, multilaterals, nonprofits and businesses together around shared goals. It started in Morocco, where she served in the Peace Corps.