The Environmental Education Advocate - Summer 1996
The following information is provided to you as a service of the National Environmental Education Advancement Project (NEEAP). We encourage you to use it and please credit the National Environmental Education Advancement Project where appropriate.
The Leadership Clinic at Treehaven was significant for several reasons including the involvement of the NAAEE Affiliates. The Treehaven meeting was the largest-ever working meeting of NAAEE state and provincial Affiliates, with 39 of the 44 organizations represented!
By "piggy-backing" a meeting of the NAAEE Affiliates upon the EE 2000 Leadership Clinic, multiple goals were achieved, and the results seemed to exceed everyone's expectations. The intangible results of goodwill, positive spirit, and sense of renewed optimism and dedication which seemed to steadily permeate the Affiliate leaders ultimately led to a rather crucial transformation.
They may have arrived as a somewhat disjointed assortment of highly dedicated, if somewhat beleaguered, warriors taking a moment for a furtive look around in the midst of their own state capacity-building battles. No one felt certain about what could be accomplished at the meeting; several were unsure about their own role; some barely understood their state organization s role as an Affiliate or the relationship to NAAEE; a few weren t really sure why they were there. But, somehow, they left the meeting just four days later with a sense of community and common purpose.
As individual leaders, they were able to attend the clinic s impressive lineup of speakers and expert panelists. They absorbed the skill development and leadership training experiences offered to the EE 2000 participants, and shared ideas or experiences with one another. Several commented that they felt significantly more prepared to go back to their state and guide the development of strategic plans or otherwise strengthen their state capacity-building efforts.
They also gained an important component of strategic planning--that of minimizing mistakes and maximizing resources by learning from others who have travelled the path before them. They shared strategic plans, statewide master plans, designs for governing boards; they discussed strategies that have worked for their peers in membership, fundraising, and other key state capacity-building issues. This process rapidly gave way to building a sense of community by further developing the Affiliates as a support network. In fact, the single EE 2000 state who was not already an NAAEE Affiliate was seriously reconsidering the idea well before the meeting ended.
Finally, the Affiliate leaders even gave up what normally would have been several hours worth of free or open time (e.g. during the evenings and even some break and meal sessions) to hammer out recommendations for Affiliate governance and policies within NAAEE s long-range planning process.
Recognizing the enormous potential of the Affiliates as a group, NAAEE, NEEAP, and USEPA (via EETAP funding) are making substantial strategic investments in helping to develop state capacity-building in environmental education, and appropriately with the Affiliates as the focal point. The experience at Treehaven was as invigorating as it was important.
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