“Stepping into the field of the future starts with attending to the opening of an inner crack. Following the crack requires us to let go of the old and ‘let grow’ something we can sense, but that we cannot fully know before we see it emerge.”
Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer (Leading from the Emerging Future, 2013)
A Generational View of Conservation
Generations of people across all lands and multiple agencies and institutions are needed to work together to conserve vital ecological and community resources for the future. To do this work, we need new ways of seeing the problem from multiple perspectives to achieve solutions–with leadership at all levels.
Working in the Gap
Our team supports conservationists, agencies, and organizations with leadership development and coaching services; strategic initiatives that move the needle for community-based, landscape-scale conservation; and broader engagement in conservation through relationships–what we refer to as making conservation more relevant to more people.
We work with public agencies, private non-profit groups and corporations, Indigenous partners, and other sectors to bridge the gap between the status quo and their aspirations to achieve sustainable, breakthrough change.
Build Your Adaptive Capacity and Resilience
What do we mean by adaptive capacity and resilience? In ecological terms, adaptive capacity is an indicator of evolutionary adaptive potential connected to the ability of a species or ecosystem to persist over time and through change. In social systems, adaptive capacity relates to the ability of humans to respond to changes around them and evolve through disequilibrium, challenges, and disruption of the status quo.
Resilience also has many definitions. Primarily, the term characterizes a person’s or organization’s ability to withstand or recover from adversity, difficulty, challenges, and trauma. For our work, we gravitate towards this definition: “Resilience is the power to be energized and elevated by disruption. It is the internal fortitude to emerge stronger and even more effective from tough situations.” – Jennifer Eggers & Cynthia Barlow
We belong to the natural world. To conserve valuable resources and communities for future generations, we need to learn, grow, and develop our adaptive capacity and resilience to address complex challenges with purpose and experimentation.