Workshop Advances a National Park Service Priority
When Laura Gates, superintendent of the Cane River
Creole National Historical Park in northwest Louisiana, arrived
at the workshop that CSI co-sponsored in Santa Fe last March,
she hoped that she could both contribute lessons from her
own experience and learn from other seasoned practitioners.
Gates traveled to this program, “Collaboration and Conservation:
Lessons Learned from National Park Service Partnership Areas
in the Western U.S.,” with a partner in her work, Nancy
Morgan, executive director of the Cane River National Heritage
Area, a congressionally designated regionally distinct rural
agricultural landscape that includes the historical park.
Participants at Western U.S. Partnership
Areas workshop
Photo: Nora Mitchell
Within the National Park Service, diverse working partnerships are a growing presence; these include areas that are managed through collaboration with many other organizations, such as national heritage areas. In recognition of the increasing importance of collaboration, NPS Director Fran P. Mainella created an associate director for partnerships and the NPS Partnership Council. Drawing its membership from parks and regions, the council advises Mainella and her leadership team on ways that partnerships could be expanded “across NPS program and geographic lines.”
“Our most effective work results from engagement with others, where the collective effort extends the reach of all,” Director Mainella wrote. “The [National Park] Service and our partners understand it is only through our combined efforts that we can help our society to succeed in passing on unimpaired to future generations the national system of parks and special places …”
CSI designed the partnership workshop in collaboration with the QLF/Atlantic Center for the Environment and the NPS Planning and Special Studies Program. The workshop created an opportunity for 27 people with substantial partnership experience to reflect on what they have learned, and to collectively identify insights and strategies. Jackie Tuxill, CSI director for partnership programs, explained, “workshops like this allow people to share their experience with peers—it’s structured for dialogue.”
“One of the things I loved about the program,” Gates said, “was learning how partners in other parts of the country are operating.” She was particularly impressed with the idea that “partnerships are key,” not only to her park and heritage area, but “for any kind of concept to flourish, that partnerships are built on trust, [and] that every interaction must have trust as the basis of it.”
More Interactive, More Proactive
Another experienced partner who participated in
the workshop was Greg Moore, executive director of the Golden
Gate National Parks Conservancy, a community-based nonprofit
that has been working for 15 years with Golden Gate National
Recreation Area, a 75,000- acre complex of national parks
in
the San Francisco Bay area.
“Here at Golden Gate, our community is broad and diverse—it runs the gamut from school kids to senior citizens, to people of all economic and [ethnic] backgrounds, to people who see that the ideals of the NPS have resonance within their own communities.”
“When the conservancy began, we started with the primary purpose of providing quality interpretive and education materials for park visitors … over time, we began to see that interpreting park values was a multifaceted enterprise, and it meant more than publishing brochures—it needed to be more interactive, more proactive, it had to reach outside park boundaries and involve people.”
Moore said he, too, took away new ideas and insights from the Santa Fe workshop. “Partnerships by their nature are very custombuilt for each individual alliance,” he said. “So the ability to be among professional practitioners who are trying a whole variety of interesting and effective techniques and programs is illuminating in terms of the content, and it’s also inspiring.”
Creating a "Road Map"
 Participants to Western U.S. Partnership Areas workshop Photo: Nora Mitchell |
“The trail runs through lands that we have long-term ties with—either we manage them, or communities that live along the trail provide management,” Schlanger explained. The partnership, she said “is a way for the bureau to reach out to those communities in a different way: not through issuing permits, but by working with those communities to come to a better understanding of our shared heritage.” The El Camino Trail collaboration has, she said, “opened BLM’s eyes to the opportunity to connect with communities in a totally different way than we normally do.”
At the partnership areas workshop, Schlanger found that, indeed, “the things that people are doing out there are models for being creative to get things done. The people who were at that workshop are really an astonishing group, who have been able to put together quite diverse and powerful partnerships.”
Karen Wade, former NPS regional director for the Intermountain Region, agrees. “The parks that are doing the best are those that have figured out how to collaborate and share … It is my belief that building relationships creates opportunities.”
Wade also participated in the workshop. “It was very exciting; [the dialogue] allowed for consensus ideas to emerge. We ended up with a list of ideas that were so well-constructed that it provides a road map for the development of partnership programs for the whole service.” The workshop participants produced a brief summary of the workshop, “Developing a Sustainable Environment for Partnerships,” and presented it to the NPS Partnership Council. These recommendations call for placing communities at the center of partnerships, developing a compelling vision statement for partnership work, mapping the assets from which the NPS can learn, and doing research and analysis that can support partnership work. CSI published the findings of this workshop in Conservation and Collaboration: Lessons Learned from National Park Service Partnership Areas in the Western United States to encourage more discussion on partnerships.
“A conventional view of partnership is that it’s
something that you enter into so that each party can advance
an agenda, or have more resources to get something done,”
Moore reflected after the program. “A deeper view
has evolved for me—that a partnership really allows
for broader community and societal ownership of what the
national park values are all about, and to help evolve the
meaning of what national parks and protected areas mean
for people from a variety of backgrounds. … This creates
a richer concept of what national parks can be and should
be for the future.
(Above text by Doug Wilhelm)
