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This blog post was written by a guest author as part of our Tales from Field series, the goal of which was to share stories of how BEETLES resources get implemented in the field.
Minnesota is home to five accredited residential environmental learning centers (RELCs) that host overnight field trips for students from Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and more. Our centers are independent entities that have no financial ties to one another. But despite this, we’ve long had a collaborative approach to projects, grants, fundraising, and reaching broader audiences. Therefore, when we had an opportunity to collaborate on a grant through BEETLES that was geared towards supporting regional capacity building, it was really just a matter of determining what project we could develop.
What did we hope to achieve with this grant? We immediately saw an intended outcome that is two-fold: to deepen the collaborative and to grow our capacity for equity. First, we seek to build and strengthen this regional partnership that has been working together for over 30 years in different capacities to support residential environmental education in our state. We see partnership as an important part of supporting the students we serve in a couple of ways. On the micro-level, coming together to share ideas allows each of our centers to process challenges we are facing, identify new resources, and try new things that ultimately support the students that we serve. On the macro-level, when we work in partnership we are more likely to influence systems-level change, leveraging our unified efforts to amplify impact. Being in collaboration empowers our work across the board.
The second outcome is to critically examine how our organizational cultures support justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). Ultimately, we knew this was a multi-year project that would influence all aspects of our organizations. The mission of all participating learning centers is to get their participants outside, connecting with and learning about the natural world and the role we play in supporting a healthy and resilient environment. It is a regional goal to make environmental education more accessible, inclusive, and equitable — we believe that by starting with our organizational cultures we will build a strong foundation. From there, we can then look more deeply into the equity across our curriculum, our training, hiring practices, and beyond. Working together to share resources, ideas, and trainings, will allow us to identify and make changes at our individual centers and also create regionally-relevant resources. This collaborative approach to equity work can bring about maximum impact, too.
With our grant funds, we opted to look at our organization culture with the support of a consultant to assess all staff at all five centers for diversity and inclusion. Our consultant, August Ball from Cream City Conservation, first had our staff and board take two surveys. One focused on how staff and board felt about inclusion within their organization. The other survey was a personal assessment of an individual’s diversity and inclusion journey. August gathered all of the data and then presented the findings to the staff and board from all organizations.
Through the survey, we learned that there were some things in our organizations that we were doing well, and of course there were (are) areas of opportunity. The top two places we “thrived” as a collaborative were with staff and board engagement (people are proud to work at their organizations and are motivated to fulfill their commitments to their organizations) and belonging (staff and boards are respected by the organization and within their department and they feel like they can be their true, authentic selves in the workplace). Our two biggest areas of opportunity were in equity (staff are unable to sustain themselves fully with the compensation that they receive from their position and staff and board did not think we had a system/tool for making decisions equitably, inclusively and just) and diversity (while folks said all organizations valued diversity, we did not score well with building diverse teams).
With the survey feedback, our consultant worked with one representative from each organization over the following ten months to analyze the results and develop action steps in the form of a road map for our organizations to take that would help improve staff equity and inclusion. This road map functions very similarly to a logic model, helping us to identify activities, metrics, staff leads, and outcomes. We used data from the surveys, namely from categories that had areas of opportunity such as equity and diversity, to help us determine our main focus areas.
Since each of our organizations operate as separate entities, building the road map took a lot of trial and error as we figured out what our collaborative capacity actually was and what we would be able to achieve. As we began to work on our road map (i.e. identify activities, metrics, and outcomes), we met as a large group, both with and without August, to populate different sections with content. Progress at this phase was slow and arduous, and there were a number of things that slowed us down.
We share these for others to learn from:
Some additional examples of outcomes we’ve identified on our road map are:
We’re really looking forward to following our road map toward more equity and efficacy. In recent history, it’s the most our organizations have collaborated. It was a pretty big learning experience, especially since many of the topics, strategies, and activities we were developing are in areas that we don’t have a lot of experience in. Thankfully, our consultant August was very willing to provide us with examples, templates, and many already established resources. As well, the shared commitment of the organizations has fueled our continuation of this work into our areas of growth.
Lastly, we encourage other organizations to form similar collaboratives in their regions or states, even with those they might consider to be their competitors. It’s hard work finding time to meet, figuring out what you can collaborate on, and getting funding to do so. And JEDI work is also hard stuff that takes a lot of time, introspection, personal and organizational growth, and commitment. However, if we reflect back on the two-fold purpose of this grant — strengthening the relationship between our five organizations and assessing the organizational culture of the five Minnesota RELCs so that we can better support our staff and students — then this work is worth it. Our collaborative relationship is stronger than ever, and even in the first phases of following our road map, each organization has been taking steps to internally improve staff culture and organizational systems. As our survey underscored, we already have high staff and board engagement. We all believe in our missions and we are motivated to accomplish them. Now, we have another critical component that enables us to live our missions with equity.
This project was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation under Grant No.1612512. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Find other Tales from the Field by filtering for “Stories of Implementation.”