Our workshop on environmental dispute resolution was a huge success. Established professionals have commented that this skill is highly relevant for wildlife professionals. We would love to have you organize a workshop on this topic locally for your section or chapter. Please see here for the proposal we submitted to TWS.
To find a trainer, we recommend you start by contacting the leaders of your section or chapter for recommendations; it is likely that someone will have a colleague that does these trainings fairly inexpensively. If you have funds, or are willing to charge participants a fee, there are numerous organizations that offer training workshops of varying lengths and costs. We worked with Mary Lou Addor of the Natural Resources Leadership Institute (NLRI) at North Carolina State University, but there are NRLIs at other institutions (for instance, University of Florida). Here are some other organizations that offer training for a cost:
- The Udall Foundation, National
- Human Wildlife Conflict Collaboration, Houston, TX
- CDR Associates, Boulder, CO
- Kearns and West, West Coast (see a proposal we secured from this company for an example of cost)
- Concur, Berkeley, CA
- Community at Work, San Francisco, CA
- Check local universities, agencies, etc.
Environmental dispute resolution is a very important skill for wildlife professionals to have, and one that is not often included in the traditional wildlife or biology curriculum. There is a free resource from the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation that can get you started on obtaining these skills. Additionally, check out this Harvard professor’s insights about conflict resolution.
Discussion during the conflict resolution workshop on October 22, 2016 in Raleigh, NC at the 23rd TWS Annual Conference.