A Milestone Summer at UC Berkeley’s Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program

Every summer at UC Berkeley’s Rausser College of Natural Resources, the Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program brings together climate and environmental professionals for a rigorous learning experience. This 3-week intensive program addresses critical environmental subjects—such as nature-based solutions to climate change, green supply chains, and biotechnology and agriculture—and offers opportunities for skill-development in, for example, collaborative leadership, green finance, conflict resolution, and consensus building.

I’ve been teaching sessions on collaborative leadership and consensus building in this program for three years. CBI board member Susan Carpenter was an instructor in the program for over twenty years before passing the project on to me. Time and again, participants have shared that the collaboration and consensus building sessions are among the most useful and immediately applicable to their work. While they certainly face scientific and technical challenges, often the most confounding issues they encounter relate to getting people to tackle complex subjects together, whether that needs to happen within an organization or externally, with stakeholders.

Each year, I’ve found it deeply fulfilling to teach those sessions, and to learn alongside international leaders grappling with some of the most difficult environmental issues around the globe, challenges including critical infrastructure needs in Gaza, human-wildlife conflicts in Kenya, and forest and fire resiliency in Thailand, among many others.

This year, the program celebrated its 25th anniversary. Participants, who converged from six continents—mostly from Africa, Asia, and South America—proved voracious learners. It was another example of the exhilarating and connective experiences I’ve come to expect from learning communities that draw from such diverse backgrounds. In these settings, the richness of the exchange between participants is unmatched. And engaging with such a wide range of lived experiences doesn’t just add to my thinking. It reshapes it.

I’ve written about the link between collaborative learning and collaborative problem-solving for CBI.org. It’s a connection I’ve experienced and witnessed across the phases of my career, first in classrooms, as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Russian Far East, and as an NGO leader working in Latin America, and then as a facilitator and mediator. The UC Berkeley Beahrs Environmental Leadership program, bringing together thoughtful professionals to study and work on consensus building and collaboration, has demonstrated that connection especially profoundly. I invite you to visit their website to learn more.