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Jon's final Director's Corner
by Jon Dain
Friday, May 31st, 2024 will be my last day as director of the Florida Natural Resources Leadership Institute (NRLI). The decision was not an easy one. I feel privileged and honored to have led the NRLI program, following in the large footsteps of Bruce Delaney, Laila Racevskis, Burl Long, and Roy Cariker. It has been an immensely exciting, rewarding, challenging and impactful position. I decided last fall that this would be my final class as director and shared my thoughts with the project team at that time.
Now to confuse you. Although I am stepping aside as director, I am not leaving the program – I am not retiring. In fact, I will continue to remain strongly engaged with NRLI as a member of the project team, planning, teaching, and helping with sessions. As I have done for many, many years. So, why am I stepping aside? The answer to the first question is deceptively simple, I step aside because it is time. I have now been with the NRLI program for 20 years and served as director for the last ten. It is my belief that a full decade as director is enough and that the program will benefit from new energy, new ideas and new leadership. NRLI has gone from an excellent and relatively small, focused program in 1998 to a multifaceted “almost-institute” that today engages in a variety of activities with far more reach and far more impact. As the reach and impact have grown, so has the demand for our services and expertise and a new director will help us better meet that demand and beyond. Stepping aside will allow me to focus my efforts on supporting such future change and growth, helping NRLI to develop in new and exciting ways. I am very excited about NRLI’s future.
The very good news is that Joy Hazell will be taking over as Interim Director, so even in the short run NRLI activities will not be affected. As most of you know, Joy has been with NRLI for many years and is a highly skilled, experienced, and thoughtful professional. She has the full and enthusiastic support of our entire team. Joy has already begun assuming some of the director responsibilities and is very well suited to guide us through this interim period as we prepare for a new director. In essence we have the same project team, we have merely switched some of the roles.
The decision to step aside was the result of a great deal of reflection on my part, with alternating moments of uncertainty, sadness, and excitement. As noted above, NRLI has been an enormous part of my professional life for a long time. For those who do not know the story, in 2003 I was teaching a class on conflict management to graduate students in UF’s Center for Latin American Studies. At the time I had been working in South America for many years and was struck by how many projects and initiatives failed due to mistrust and conflict. The problems were often linked to communication and leadership, regardless of whether those involved were from communities, NGOs, state/federal agencies, academics, or from the private sector. I learned that when people listened and engaged in dialogue, things usually went well, when they did not, distrust led to disagreement and failure. Most professionals were good, caring people, knowledgeable and trained to share their ideas and expertise (what they had been taught at universities), but few were skilled at seeking to understand the interests of others. They knew how to tell, but not how to listen. Now back in Gainesville, I wanted to create a practical, experiential class that would help graduate students learn to manage conflict. Latin American Studies gave me the space to do so for which I am forever grateful.
The class design was based my field experience, some reading on the subject, and the guidance of an environmental attorney and conflict specialist from Costa Rica who initially co-taught with me. It was a good class, but after my second semester, the Center director approached me and said, “We want you continue, but this is graduate program, and you have NO credentials. You need to get some type of certification, so we can justify your teaching”. Online searches proved frustrating, but then serendipity struck. I was attending a BBQ with my wife who was a member of the UF Forestry Department that sponsored it. I didn’t really know anyone and a kind forestry professor, Dr. Janaki Alavalapati, noticed and struck up a conversation with me. We had never met before and as we engaged in polite conversation, he mentioned the “Florida Natural Resources Leadership Institute” and then “training in conflict management”. I still recall my disbelief and how I stopped him mid-sentence to ask “did you just say conflict management training? Here at the University of Florida??” Nine months later I was a Fellow in NRLI Class 4.
That experience turned out to be transformational for me. The first session was on Everglades restoration, and we stayed in a long-ago closed motel in Flamingo. We participated in exercises to get to know each other. I was intimidated by the knowledge and experience of my classmates. On our fieldtrip we visited giant plots where enormous machinery was being used to scrape the landscape down to bare limestone. We heard from agency scientists who were studying how ecosystem recovery worked and how best to get rid of Brazilian Pepper. Over the next eight months we went all over the state, and I learned an immense amount about Florida, its environmental policies, and the organizations and work of those in my cohort. The following year, Burl Long (the director at the time), who knew that I had been teaching a class on conflict management, asked me if I would join the project team.
That was in 2005, and I have been with NRLI ever since; as a part-time project team member, then “curriculum coordinator” and finally, in 2014, as director. Over those 20 years I calculate that I have been to about 120 different three-day NRLI sessions in 80-90 different locations around the state. With that experience has come the privilege of teaching, getting to know, and learning from close to 350 natural resource professionals from our eight-month program, 150 from our four-month DEP training program, and many, many others from additional programs created for other organizations, groups, and institutions. Each one has made me feel hopeful about the future of Florida - because those hundreds of alumni do the vitally important work of managing and protecting Florida’s environment and often hold influential positions at the local, state, and even national level. In fact, if you randomly drop a pin on a Florida map you will almost surely find NRLI alumni collaboratively addressing our state’s natural resource challenges in practical and effective ways. Especially the difficult ones. Often in partnership with other alumni. In ways that incorporate the needs of multiple interests and perspectives. And doing it successfully.
That is why I accepted Burl Long’s invitation, that is why we do what we do in NRLI.
Being director of NRLI has less of a job for me and more of a mission. I deeply believe that when we bring a diverse group of good people together - regardless of who they are, where they work, where they come from or what they do - and provide them with learning experiences while helping them get to know each other, they will begin to see with new eyes. They will approach their work and colleagues differently. They will better understand the connection between working with people and working with nature. I deeply believe that the way we teach is just as important as what we teach. Anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote: “We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.” (as cited by William Ury in his book Possible). NRLI is about seeing and acting on those great opportunities. In a time of increasing concern about polarization and the state of our planet, NRLI offers concrete paths forward and practical hope.
In closing, I am proud of what we have accomplished in the last ten years, from new training initiatives to several endowments and scholarships that I hope we can continue growing. We successfully navigated the pandemic and have greatly diversified the types of organizations that send their people to NRLI for training. We receive inquiries for help facilitating meetings or offering workshops on an almost weekly basis. We have a newsletter and a social media presence. We have strengthened the curriculum. Applications to our eight-month program have skyrocketed and we have established a strong program for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. We are also beginning to better engage with our alumni and have raised our profile around the state. In short, the NRLI program is stronger than it has even been. We are ready to take the next steps with a new director sometime in the future. I am very thankful* for the strong support we receive from UF/IFAS, from our home unit the School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatic Sciences, and from our partners. Our growth and success are truly due to the remarkable team we have in Wendy-Lin Bartels, Joy Hazell and Jocelyn Peskin. They make this a quality program. And before that, Bruce Delaney and Jessica Ireland whose impact on transforming NRLI was incalculable. In practicing what we preach, we have done this together and I am eternally grateful to all of them. I am a very fortunate human being.
This is my last “Director’s Corner”, but I look forward to working with all of you in figuring out how best to take the Florida Natural Resources Leadership Institute into the future.
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*I would like to publicly thank a few others who were crucial to NRLI’s success during my tenure as director. General Joe Joyce was Vice-President of UF/IFAS when he noticed the NRLI program and decided that he liked what he saw. He believed in the program’s mission and provided us the support we needed to become what we are now. Probably the most import piece part of that support was funding to hire our first full-time program coordinator, Jessica Ireland, mentioned above. Immediately after joining the project team in 2014, Jessica, a graduate of NRLI Class 13, took one look behind the scenes, grimaced in horror, and set to work professionalizing us. It is no exaggeration to say that her impact was enormous, and her efforts enabled us to blossom. An additional thank you goes to Dr. Tim White who in 2015 invited NRLI to become part of what was then the School of Forest Resources and Conservation (now the School of Forests, Fisheries and Geomatic Sciences - SFFGS). Like Joe Joyce, Tim looked at NRLI, liked what he saw and decided to give us a chance. His successor Red Baker has been incredibly supportive.There are many others to whom I am grateful, and I want to express my gratitude to all former project team members including Janice Sheppard and Candice Kaswinkel.
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