Watershed Partnership Seminar

What is the Watershed Partnership Seminar?

The Watershed Partnership Seminar helps people learn and improve the skills necessary to promote the growth and development of local partnerships that can persist over time. This course addresses these needs within three basic themes.

One theme concentrates on identifying, building and maintaining watershed management partnerships. Course participants:

• build self-awareness skills that will enable them to recognize how their own behaviors and attitudes can contribute to or erode community partnership dynamics;
• learn personal skills to better deal with interpersonal and group conflict, and to enhance adeptness and effectiveness when working in local watershed management partnerships;
• learn how to use an interest-based, goal-oriented approach to build and maintain relationships to increase the effectiveness of long-term sustainable watershed management, and;
• examine multiple organizational development elements and learn how to combine them in various ways to enhance specific partnership communications, efficiency, productivity and performance.

A second theme is to investigate the historical and scientific bases for the watershed-based approach. This involves interactive exchanges of information with eminent scientists and academicians that will include:

• the evolution of the science of ecosystems and the watersheds that support them (including co-adaptive systems science, macroecology and complexity theory);
• the growing understanding of the relationships and roles of governance and economics in sustaining watershed resources;
• the future of environmental management in a watershed context (how watershed management integrates science, technology and sociology), and;
• the need to recognize, acquire and utilize appropriate scientific and technical information in watershed planning, assessment and decision-making (scientists will explain, with examples, the prominent roles hydro-geomorphology, plant and animal ecology, chemistry, monitoring and modeling play when planning for sustainable watershed management).

A third theme provides more opportunities to learn about the watershed approach itself from watershed management practitioners and professional environmental managers:

• Watershed environmental management practitioners will make presentations about their efforts, and then work interactively with the participants to exchange information regarding real examples, basic skills and the foresight needed, potential pitfalls, and the rewarding results of watershed partnering and decision-making.

History of the Watershed Partnership Seminar

The CALFED Watershed Program (Program) held the Watershed Partnership Seminar in California in 2001, 2003, and 2006. The Seminars are intended to increase the effectiveness of locally-driven community-based watershed management initiatives in support of the CALFED Bay-Delta Program. Those classes graduated 114 participants who continue to contribute to implementing the Program across California. The next Seminar, scheduled for October 2006, continues the Program’s commitment to support local capacity building to improve the management of watersheds affecting the Bay-Delta system.

The Watershed Partnership Seminar was originally designed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds (OWOW) and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The Seminar was intended as a management development class for agency managers within the EPA to support the agency’s community-based environmental management initiatives targeting wetlands and water quality. Eventually, OWOW invited participants from outside the EPA to join the classes in order to bring greater diversity of perspectives and backgrounds to the Seminar. The Seminar quickly gained national accolades as an excellent training course, made more valuable through the extensive network established among its graduates.

The course is intended for middle to upper management and other professionals. Students selected for the course are specifically chosen to represent the range of interests and skills likely in any given watershed community. Past graduates include agency directors; managers and supervisors from local, state and federal agencies; tribal leaders from multiple Native American communities; trade group executives (including the Silicon Valley Manufacturers Group, the Northern California Home Builders Association, and Farm Bureau); local elected officials and professional local government planners; not-for-profit organization executives and board members; and a range of other occupations that includes ranchers, forest product company managers, and educators and environmental professionals.

How Can I Get Information on Future Seminars?

If you have questions or would like more information, please contact: Julie Alvis or Dennis Bowker.

What Have Others Said About the Seminar?

“This experience is full-out, hands-on, no slack. That’s good. I’ve enjoyed the experience even it if means I fall behind at my real work. I see this workshop as having a direct impact on my real work”

“Very dense Seminar – excellent job. For me, the speakers’ ability – polish, finesse, ease – really helps when subjects are tightly compacted”

“Fantastic!”

“This was wonderful – like lots of activities that really helped team building”

“I was really amazed at how the learning process and creativity was so good with so little time and sleep. We should all be proud and it reflects good instruction”

“Inspiring and creative”

“THANK YOU - THIS WAS AN EXCELLENT PROGRAM! MORE, MORE!”