Expert Sessions | Coalition Building with David Ehrlichman

Earlier this year, we hosted a series of expert learning sessions to help shape a long-term strategy for Work on Climate—one that’s grounded in the realities of an ever-evolving political, social, and economic landscape. These sessions brought together practitioners who have driven real impact by building climate-focused ecosystems, communities, and workforces across a range of sectors and scales.

Our next expert, David Ehrlichman, is the author of a book called Impact Networks. This discussion will cover his time with the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network, one of the case studies highlighted in his book.

What change was the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network trying to create?

The Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network started in 2015. It represented an area of 500,000 acres north of San Francisco to the Santa Cruz mountains. It has incredible diversity, multiple watersheds, and it was dealing with a lot of challenges. 

Any landscape is managed by an overlapping patchwork quilt of different agencies, organizations, and private landowners. There’s also timber companies, tribal groups, academic institutions, and federal, state, and local jurisdictions. No one is really looking at the whole system because they’re all focused on their parcels of land. It gets serious when we’re talking about catastrophic wildfire risk, which the region has faced a lot in the past decade. A land trust called Sempervirens Fund started to pull these different groups together, playing the catalyst role. The network is continuing on today, doing incredible work at the systems level, looking at the whole region and figuring out how they can reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, improve permitting practices, increasing resources for environmental restoration, and more. 

Nobody sees the whole puzzle. Everyone has their own slice that they’re focused on.

Can you say more about how the network leaders decided to follow a network-based approach, as opposed to other possible approaches to this challenge?

There was a lot of distrust in the region, so it wasn’t really possible for an individual organization to lead the effort and be directive. In the case of the catalyzing organization, Sempervirens Fund, there were other groups who did not trust them and therefore would not have gone along with strategic planning efforts in the region. It was necessary to use a network approach. These organizations had all been in the region for a long time with their own perspectives, seeing different pieces of the puzzle. Nobody sees the whole puzzle. Everyone has their own slice that they’re focused on. With the level of complexity in large landscape stewardship, there’s no single action or organization that can make all the difference alone – it requires smart, coordinated efforts that can work systemically. 

How did the network attract and motivate the right members, even though they have such different interests or different understandings of the problem?

Our team at Converge was hired to help get the network started to get it to a place where it really was creating value for the organizations participating. Long story short, the network was able to advocate for more funding collectively. We helped hire and train full-time network leaders to continue to support the network thereafter, and we transitioned off. 

One of the things we did early on was interview a ton of different actors across the region. One of the initial motivating factors was, as one person put it, “If I’m not at the table, I might be on the menu.” So that’s the level of distrust that there was. That’s what motivated some people to join. Other people thought that it might be a different attempt than they’d seen before – that the network might be different for real. We did things differently early on to help people realize that. 

We were getting underneath the levels of disagreement to who the people actually were.

What did the outcomes of the network look like over time? What were some of the first signs that it seemed to be working, and how long did it take to ramp up? 

Another thing we did early on was to get to the humanity underneath the problems. We would intentionally put people with different interests, like the head of a timber company and the head of an environmental activist organization, in a group together to have them tell stories of their lives and what the land meant to them. Each person could see that both sides really care about this shared land, shared context, and shared history.

We were getting underneath the levels of disagreement to who the people actually were. We broke through the cordial hypocrisy to have enough trust or goodwill of one another’s underlying intentions in order to converse long enough to find points of agreement and start to work together. 

One accomplishment was getting rid of unnecessarily burdensome permitting processes that got in the way of important restoration work. We did some really big projects addressing the catastrophic wildfires that started to ramp up after a year or two, which received their own funding. 

For funders, we did social network analysis. We surveyed everyone in the network in terms of who they were connected to, what type of communication they were having, and whether they were collaborating with one another. We could then show funders quantitatively that the connections across the system were proliferating. We could show there was increased connectivity, communication, and coordination already happening. We were trying to create a healthier and healthier system that will lead over time to other outcomes that funders were looking for. It was useful for funders to see that before and after to give them confidence that they should continue to fund the network, because it was going to lead to tangible outcomes. 

Before you got to the state where you could prove the effectiveness of the work, how did you sell it to funders in the first place? What parts of the initiative required funding?

Early on, we developed a collective memorandum of understanding written by the first 20 participating organizations. The memorandum explained what these organizations were seeing happen in the landscape and what they thought was important, as well as what they wanted to act on. Everyone signed it. It was a pretty big deal that these organizations were coming together and having that level of shared agreement, with clarity and intention. Based on that, we wrote a proposal for more funding as a group. Funders talk about wanting to see collaboration in grantees a lot, but they don’t actually know how to get there. Our group of 20 organizations was really, really different than a single organization trying to start a collaborative effort. I’ve seen a lot of network efforts controlled by funders that don’t really work. The funder can be the catalyst, but not the coordinator, not the facilitator, and they can’t direct the outcomes. They need to let the people actually figure out what they think can be done together. We did that – we let our proposed outcomes be totally emergent from participants. So that was really compelling to funders. 

Funders need to let the people actually figure out what they think can be done together.

Can you say a few words about how the network looked operationally? What activities did you do as the convener? 

There are different roles in network leadership. There’s the catalyst who brings people together in the first place, then there’s facilitators. We were facilitators, and we eventually hired people to fulfill that role to help to foster the conversation. So it flows downstream and addresses tensions, fostering relationships between different groups, seeing opportunities for different groups to be able to work with one another, actually connecting them together and providing the context for them to do something together. We also did the coordination, the back-of-house stuff, like all the operational things, structural aspects of communication channels, convening, organizing, and so forth. 

You mentioned a few different network leadership roles. Can you explain a little more about those roles, particularly the weaving role, and how they fit into this crowded, messy space of organizations?

The four network leadership roles I named were catalyzing, facilitating, weaving, and coordinating. Those are described in my book. Ultimately, I worked on about 60 different impact networks, and interviewed dozens more people who have done this work for a long time. The benefit of consulting was seeing the common patterns that rose from different networks. That’s where these practices come from. So you can imagine the act of weaving the network together and creating this connective tissue. I’ve had people say, you know, you’re describing something that I’ve intuitively been doing for my whole life, but I didn’t have a word for it. Part of our work in raising up the profile of network leaders is to say that this is a really important role, and it should be resourced and supported. 

What about the coordinating role?

The coordinator is at the center of this whole thing, a lot like herding cats and individual messages, because people often don’t check the group chat or whatever communication platform. The coordinator will send individual messages to make sure people are doing the right things and are aware of what’s coming next. They prime the information that the person needs and so forth. There’s endless logistical things behind the scenes. 

What are some pitfalls to avoid in impact networks?

One is the catalyst, like the funder, trying to direct outcomes before people have a chance to identify them for themselves. Another is lack of role clarity for accountability and responsibility. A lot of these networks can be good at identifying what needs to happen, but then struggle with the “how.” That’s because people are coming together as equals without a clear power structure already in place where some people can delegate work to others and hold them accountable. Sometimes that means that there are great plans that don’t get executed – it’s not a good idea if it can’t be done. Impact networks need to take the steps to get really clear about what needs to happen between then and the next time cycle in terms of who is going to do what and when. Each project needs a really active leader to keep things on track and keep people accountable.