Great River Greening
Report date
December 2017
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Farmer and Community-led Process: Strategic recruitment of Core Team members from key stakeholder groups proved critical to project success. Selected Core Team members planned the Watershed Visioning Conversation and recruited their fellow community members to participate. Sixty-five community members (farmers, environmentalists, and community citizens) engaged in the Visioning Conversation, which developed the framework for a community-generated watershed plan, with distinctive metrics for achieving and measuring success. The Visioning Conversation focused on engaging community members, sharing different perspectives, collaborating, breaking down barriers, developing trust, and generating buy-in. Both Core Team and Watershed Visioning Conversations used the “Art of Hosting” participatory leadership style to facilitate productive exchanges of ideas and action. While the process of strategically developing these Teams was deliberate with measured progress, Greening has been applauded for not abandoning the concept in favor of what would have been more expedient or more easily controlled.
Community Assessment: Feedback from University of Minnesota partners helped us understand our community better. We learned that despite almost 20 years of watershed-based water quality programs, the need for watershed program education remains. The assessment also revealed common concerns and interests with the agricultural community, confirming the need to create opportunities to build bridges between farming and non-farming stakeholders.
Volunteer Events on Farms: By engaging non-farmer volunteers in an on-farm community project, people developed increased understanding of what farming looks like in their community today. The opportunity to volunteer and ask questions (about farm economics, basic farm operations, and environmental regulations) proved critical, helping participants think more deeply about the complexities of water quality and agriculture issues while encouraging empathy for community members “on the other side.” These events were also instrumental in generating local media coverage of the Watershed Program and Greening’s expanded role in the community.
Key lessons learned
We learned that in order to catalyze a community process that is really owned and legitimized by the community as a whole, you have to go out and find the right people to engage in the process. Strategic recruitment of Core Team members required time for trust-building and involved vulnerability and risk when convincing community members to participate. While this intentional recruitment and selection of Core Team members caused a delay in the grant timeline and associated deliverables, it was pivotal to project success. Grant accomplishments would not have been possible without preparing our community to engage in dialogue over the past few years (continuing conversations started by watershed districts over the past two decades). This preparation better enabled members to learn, engage outside of their comfort zone, and start thinking both broadly and deeply about complex issues.
We learned that farmers don’t talk to each other as much as they did a generation ago, but many people still want to tell their story. The primary tenet for engaging farmers was to facilitate opportunities to make them feel important, included, and listened to. However, if the “tell me your story” conversation lacks intention, it falls short of achieving our primary tenet, while producing non-standardized results. This realization was brought to our attention through an external research group, who later conducted community assessment interviews. The external research group introduced expressed intention into the “tell me your story” conversations, in order to produce more accurate results.
We learned that a tool is not a substitute for a process. In the original concept, we proposed using a collaborative geo-design tool developed by partners at the University of Minnesota. Although we were enthused to employ this tool in the process, it became evident that a shared community concept of what a water and farming landscape looked like was needed. Only after these principles are adopted, can we then use that tool, or others, to develop paths to that future.
Reflections on the community innovation process
Inclusive: One of the most important components of our community process was the degree to which backward-planning for inclusivity was needed to generate self-reflection within our program and organization. The thought process was something like this: to create a community process that will generate the results that we want, we need the right people at the table. In order to get the right people at the table, we have to invite them to invest their time and energy doing the work and taking the risks to develop something special and transformative. To attract their attention, time, and energy stakeholders need to be willing to push the envelope towards inclusivity. Basically, the people whose participation can really change the conversation and move the needle may not be attracted to participate in the same old process. Therefore, in order to achieve inclusivity, we created conditions that motivate their participation long before inviting them to engage.
Progress toward an innovation
Bush Foundation funding enabled us to reverse the flow of information within the watershed planning process, focusing on community participants as the primary source of information or feedback. Farmers and landowners were encouraged to contribute their thoughts during Core Team meetings and to provide feedback on research conducted by agencies and Great River Greening and have been invited to participate in workshops and conferences alongside agency planners and researchers. In addition, we have established a new mechanism for community stakeholders to interact with one another, one in which Core Team participants view fellow participants as resources and allies. Friendships across interest groups have developed; during this year’s harvest, one of our academic researchers rode in a combine with a farmer from the Core Team. Another Core Team member will be hosting a photography exhibition of at a local art center, highlighting Core Team members and farmers in the watershed; farmers, researchers, and agency representatives were invited to share their stories at the exhibit.
What it will take to reach an innovation?
We have made amazing progress at getting participants to interact and to respect and understand the diverse perspectives and constraints experienced by other stakeholders. This is especially true within the Core Team where a diverse cross-section of community members, producers, and agency personnel participated in the watershed visioning approach. This was also true of the interactions Core Team members have with other constituencies. However, we still have not reached all private citizens with this approach. Our next big questions are: How do we bring more people into the conversation? How do we reach out to people who remain suspicious, disinterested, or too busy to participate in this sometimes difficult process? How can we integrate scientific data into the community discussion in a meaningful way?
What's next?
Since the Seven Mile Creek watershed generates overwhelming interest and requests for action from researchers, conservation organizations, etc., there is a need to develop a watershed planning model to help consolidate these activities. Greening commissioned two studies to gather information and test processes to refine our strategic plan and collaborative model. We plan to conduct a performance analysis of our Core Team and UMN study, then integrate them into a user-friendly model for collaborative watershed planning. Greening will also investigate the use of existing tools to augment our collaborative approach. For example, the AgSolver software examines the cost-benefit of altering cropping systems on individual farms. A UMN geodesign tool can evaluate the effects of altering placement of crops, crop choices, and placement of conservation practices on the landscape. The authors of these two tools are integrating them into an interactive decision-making tool that stakeholders can easily use. With further assistance from the Bush Foundation, Greening believes that an efficient, scalable, and user-friendly model can be developed to improve community engagement and decision-making.
If you could do it all over again...
Be bold; ask your partners and stakeholders for big things. One of the most transformative experiences was when we asked a reluctant partner to recruit and invite people from a key stakeholder group to participate in the Core Team. We were struggling with how to engage this partner which would result in buy-in and increased investment of their time and energy. We found that by giving the partner an important job, their interest and enthusiasm was developed. The partner proved to be a huge asset and advocate; the watershed program is much stronger because this key partner is so deeply committed to our collective work. We should have done this much sooner, and we should have tried the same approach with other participants to deepen engagement.
One last thought
Due to unforeseen delays with the University of Minnesota survey, the results and lessons learned from it still need to be integrated with those from Core Team activities. Greening will complete this in 2018. However, our work will not be complete. Once our model is refined, we will utilize the lessons learned to provide diverse and non-confrontational opportunities for stakeholder “cross pollination” on new initiatives including MPCA 319 comprehensive water quality monitoring and UMN alternative crops/biomass markets.
We intend to scale up by introducing this process into other watersheds in the region. We envision using this model in areas such as the Cannon River Watershed and the Mississippi Headwaters. In the Cannon River Watershed, Greening is developing a partnership with the Trust for Public Lands and the Cannon River Watershed Partnership. In the Mississippi Headwaters region, Greening is part of two regional partnerships which include a diverse cross-section of stakeholders. In addition, we will utilize the process for engaging stakeholders vested in private lands restoration projects. Current partners include the Deer Lake Owners Associations and pipeline properties.
We intend to scale up by introducing this process into other watersheds in the region. We envision using this model in areas such as the Cannon River Watershed and the Mississippi Headwaters. In the Cannon River Watershed, Greening is developing a partnership with the Trust for Public Lands and the Cannon River Watershed Partnership. In the Mississippi Headwaters region, Greening is part of two regional partnerships which include a diverse cross-section of stakeholders. In addition, we will utilize the process for engaging stakeholders vested in private lands restoration projects. Current partners include the Deer Lake Owners Associations and pipeline properties.