The most impactful and meaningful community-centered environmental improvement projects are those that engage broad coalitions of community partners – community organizations and neighborhood groups, residents, business owners, local leaders, and more. Often, these projects require collaboration and a process for shared decision-making among its leaders – but there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this type of collaboration.
As a collaboratively-led partnership and peer-to-peer learning community, the Urban Waters Learning Network has gone through several iterations of shared leadership. We’ve wrestled – and re-wrestled – with all sorts of questions: How do we ensure that we all have the same information? How do we keep aligned toward our end goals while working on separate projects? How do we work through disagreements? How do we prioritize when resources are limited?
We’ve been refining our shared leadership model for over a decade, and it’s looked different in every season. We’ve come to our current model through years of experimenting, honest conversations, missteps, and learning by doing.
What we’ve built is not a one-size-fits-all framework but it’s something that works for us, and might spark ideas for you!
To learn more, visit our blog post where we shared reflections and case studies on our shared leadership journey here:
