BLACKWELL: In this week's CNN Heroes African lions are teetering on the brink of extinction with only 30,000 of them left on the entire continent.</s>PAUL: But there's one woman who is part of a community of conservationist battling to turn that startling fact around. Meet Leela Hazzah.</s>LEELA HAZZAH, CNN HERO: And 60 years ago probably half a million lions in Africa. Today there's less than 30,000 lions in all of Africa. If we don't do something soon there are going to be no lions left maybe in 10, 15 years. Who knows? I spent a year living in this community to understand why people were killing lions. It brings a huge amount of prestige to the warrior, and they were killing lions in retaliation for livestock that were killed. They started opening up and telling me stories. That's when it clicked. If we want to conserve wildlife, we have to integrate communities. Our organization hires warriors and it converts lion killers into lion guardians. When we first hired lion guardians, they don't know how to read or write. We provide all of that literacy training and technical training. They track lions so they can keep very accurate ecological data on lion movements. The Lion Guardian model is founded on multicultural values, and it is just being tweaked a bit to the 21st century. We never really even imagine that we could transform these flying killers to the point where they would be risk their own lives to stop other people from killing lions. When I first moved here, I never heard lions roaring. But now, I hear lions roaring all the time.</s>PAUL: If you'd like to nominate a hero, go to CNNheroes.com. Go make great some memories today. But stick around. We're leaving you in very capable hands.</s>BLACKWELL: Yes, we're turning things over to our colleagues Ana Cabrera here at CNN World Headquarter, and Martin Savidge in Jerusalem covering for Fredricka Whitfield today.
CNN Hero Works to Preserve African Lions