ELP NEWS: Beyond the Fellowship
New Initiatives to Expand the ELP Network
The Environmental Leadership Program aims to serve a broad constituency of emerging leaders, as well as organizations working on leadership development across the environmental field. ELP is pursuing several initiatives to develop new collaborations and networks.
Philadelphia Regional Network
Through its national ELP Fellowship, the Environmental Leadership Program provides training and support to 20-25 emerging environmental leaders each year. However, there are many talented activists and professionals around the United States who are not able to participate in the Fellowship, but still need peer support and skill training to strengthen their effectiveness. ELP hopes to provide additional leadership development opportunities by developing a regional network for promising local environmental leaders.
With support from the William Penn Foundation, ELP will launch the Philadelphia Regional Network in January 2004 as a pilot program for emerging leaders in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The network will connect participants with others working in the same geographic region with whom they otherwise might not interact. It will bring together leaders from all sectors and many environmental disciplines to foster collaboration on environmental protection at a regional level.
Participants will take part in networking, training, and discussion opportunities aimed at building personal leadership capacity and opening up new pathways to collaboration. They will gain insight into each others' work, share resources and skills, and develop valuable alliances to improve their efforts in their own communities and across the region. Particular training topics may include public communications; conflict negotiation; cross-sector coalition building; diversity in the workplace and the Philadelphia environmental and smart growth fields; and personal leadership development. ELP hopes the network will help create an integrated approach to conservation, community development, and sustainability in the Philadelphia area.
ELP will work with its Philadelphia advisory committee in the fall of 2003 to finalize the Regional Network program and design. ELP will launch the pilot Philadelphia Regional Network in January 2004, with activities from January through July. Events will be held each month, offering members an array of training, leadership development, networking, intergenerational dialogue, and public speaking opportunities. Additionally, ELP is exploring opportunities to launch Regional Networks in other cities across the country.
Boston Environmental Organizations Collaborate on Diversity
Boston-based environmental organizations are forging a new collaboration on diversity in the environmental field. With support from Third Sector New England's Diversity Initiative, this year, ELP created a Boston Environmental Diversity Collaborative Pilot Project to assess interest in furthering diversity initiatives within environmental organization and across groups.
The highlight of the pilot project was a two-day June meeting that combined interactive training, participant presentations, and brainstorming sessions. The group explored the personal, professional, and institutional aspects of diversity and applied their learning in the trainings to dissect diversity challenges and opportunities facing the environmental field. They analyzed the dimensions of diversity and how they play out in the environmental movement and shared personal and professional lessons that have impacted their work. Participants also presented case studies from their organization's efforts to diversify their staff, create organizational culture change that supports diversity, and impact their constituencies and the environmental field at large.
At the conclusion of the meeting, participants were eager to continue the joint work begun during the pilot project. One participant commented, "I think an organized initiative within the Boston environmental movement focused on [diversity] could be a great asset, and could generate fresh ideas, as well as fresh contacts."
ELP hopes to expand the pilot project in the next two years by formalizing the Diversity Collaborative and implementing programs to make the Boston area a hub for acting on diversity and to impact the entire environmental field.
For more information on the Boston Environmental Diversity Collaborative, contact us at info@elpnet.org.
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