2-hour webinar

• Develop a common understanding of the evolution of the roles of stakeholders and agency professionals in natural resource conservation.
• Discuss implementation and evaluation of an approach to balancing stakeholder and agency professional roles to achieve biologically-sound and stakeholder-supported fish and wildlife conservation.
• Share participants’ experiences and perspectives on how agencies can balance stakeholder involvement and science in the future.

2-hour webinar

Many people believe all stress is bad, but a certain level of stress can help us grow. While examining stressful situations at work or in our personal lives we will:

• Define forms of stress
• Outline stress in the conscious and unconscious to clarify action
• Learn the four greatest personal fears and how they affect stress
• Practice uncovering deep personal judgments that often cause undue stress

2-hour webinar

For many, 2020 showed us the need for creating better boundaries between work and personal lives. Our “always on” culture had blurred the lines and new work from home orders amplified the need to communicate boundaries and expectations, which are what drives behavior. Clear boundaries and expectations improve personal and professional relationships, reduce stress, improve morale and provide a powerful framework to get work done efficiently and effectively. In this webinar, we will:

• Determine personal values as the key to creating boundaries
• Discuss ways to develop team operating values and behaviors
• Identify what prevents us from setting boundaries both personally and professionally
• Make a commitment to setting at least one new boundary and discuss how to communicate it

2-hour Webinar

Conflict is inevitable and there is a simple process to guide you to shared understanding and compromise. During this webinar, we will use a personal conflict situation to help us:

• Identify different types of conflict
• Apply a conflict resolution model to resolve personal or professional conflict
• Explain a process to get “unstuck” from a stressful situation
• Illustrate similarities to two other popular conflict resolution models

2-hour Webinar

Progress requires cooperation. This webinar will help you identify and use language that inspires cooperation within your teams. We will practice iterative listening and will leverage reactions to statements and/or personal experiences to help us:

• Use shared meaning to reach shared goals
• Discuss assertive versus controlling language
• Learn the importance of ordinal process for everyone to be heard
• Cite at least three differences between resistant and non-resistant language

2-hour webinar

Cultural competency and humility are required for all aspects of life and work when we care about diversity, inclusion and belonging. Our awareness, knowledge, and skills in understanding different cultures is key to engaging with more diverse audiences. We must understand our own lenses to the world and be clear on where our assumptions about others might affect our approaches to hiring, relevancy, working with constituents and partners, and improving internal work culture, just to name a few. In this webinar, we’ll touch on the differences between cultural competence and cultural humility and what it means for the work in conservation.

2-hour webinar

This interactive webinar will exploredecisions-making styles and mindsets that impact our ability to make decisionsfor ourselves, and in particular, with others. Awareness of how we approachdecisions will help us to influence the decision-making of others. Best-practices for influencing difficult or contentious decisions will beaddressed. Tools for making decisions with teams and organizations areprovided so that participants have frameworks to use in the workplace.

2-hour webinar

This dynamic and interactive webinar is designed to redefine leadership as a renewable resource, essential for fostering both personal and organizational success. This is about moving beyond self-care toward building a system that helps people navigate challenging work while maintaining balance. Participants will delve into the distinction between self-care and capacity building, exploring how to intentionally expand their leadership "reservoir" through mindset shifts and targeted strategies. The session will emphasize the ripple effects of increased leadership capacity on team productivity, organizational culture, and long-term sustainability.

Through a combination of discussion, practical exercises, and energy management techniques, attendees will learn to recognize the signs and impacts of limited capacity, both in themselves and within their teams. They will identify personal and organizational barriers to capacity-building and gain hands-on experience with tools that promote sustainable growth in leadership.

Objectives:

• Understand the distinction between self-care and capacity-building
• Recognize the signs and impacts of limited capacity
• Identify barriers to capacity-building
• Learn and practice tools for expanding leadership capacity

Outcomes:

• Enhanced awareness of the critical role of capacity-building in sustainable leadership
• Practical strategies for aligning high-priority tasks with personal energy peaks
• Improved ability to foster a culture of continuous growth and resilience within teams
• Actionable steps for integrating capacity-building practices into daily routines

2, 2-hour webinars

This 2-part webinar series will help not only provide you with a skill set to create better PowerPoint slides, but also give you knowledge as to how people comprehend. This webinar series offers you the opportunity to improve both your PowerPoint and presentation skills.

4, 2-hour webinars

Are you ready to open to people who have relationships with nature different from your own? Join us for a four-part series that will explore and challenge your beliefs about access and nature. We will consider an ecowellness model to examine our own relationship with nature and dig into environmental identity. We will contemplate ways to converse with and embrace the experiences of anyone we meet outdoors while minimizing harm. The end goal is to pursue ways to move people from tourists to explorers and advocates of our land, water, and wildlife.

This series evolved from 2020 workshops called Beyond #ResponsibleRecreation to Human-nature connection and an Ecowellness workshop held at the 2021 North American Wildlife and Natural Resources conference. Anonymous data from these past participants will be sprinkled throughout.

The first session will focus on homework reflection, self-awareness, and self-care regarding nature. We will acknowledge ways our environmental identities develop. The second session will uncover access and dive deeper into aspects of environmental identity. We will be claiming our own environmental identities in session three. We will also finish our discussion of the ecowellness model, including a gaze into transcendence and putting humans in perspective to nature. The final session will include an introduction to a nature relationship spectrum and a fishing program using the ecowellness model. It will conclude with breakouts to consider how to incorporate series concepts into agency relevancy.

What to expect:

• A pre-homework assignment and completion of a survey with your homework reflection is required for access to the series. We will provide modifications to anyone who cannot get outside.
• An environmental identity assignment between session 2 and 3.
• Engagement through a combination of breakouts, polls, and chat.
• Reflection on the previous workshop at the beginning of each new session.
• Small mindfulness and presence activities conducted throughout.
• A compiled list of ideas for agency relevancy discussed during the sessions.

Please note that this series was carefully designed to be effective with all four sessions.

3, 3-hour webinars

If you ever wondered, how might we have the most critical of conversations and keep moving forward? This is for you. If you ever felt not heard, not seen, and not valued for your story, who you are and not found meaning to collaborations; this is for you. If you are curious about handling difficult people in conversation; this is for you. If you want to invite diversity, inclusion and belonging to your workplace but not have found the means or ways to go all the way, this is for you.

The power of an inclusive space lies in first experiencing one. It also requires building up psychological muscle and learning what is required to create psychological safety. We invite you to join us in this three-part experiential learning lab for co-creating spaces where we all feel brave, including the hosted and the hosts. You will know what it feels like to experience “a holding container” or brave space, learn how to create the container, how to keep it energized, keep the conversation going and move toward actionable outcomes. You will leave with an action plan for an upcoming meeting feeling confident to have that critical conversation in a safe and courageous manner.

Objectives:

• Create safe to brave spaces for crucial conversations
• Design an action-based learning plan for your next critical conversation/meeting
• Navigate emotions and work toward possibilities
• Strengthen psychological muscle
• Build collaborative and meaningful conversations with teams (and stakeholders)

Internal dialogue gives us clues to our deepest thinking. Learning to capture and use this dialogue improves emotional intelligence and leads to better conversations. During this webinar, we will learn and practice techniques to uncover our internal dialogue. Using challenging statements and personal experiences we will:

• Practice iterative listening
• Capture primal thoughts and feelings
• Turn personal triggers into useful responses
• Explain feelings of inferiority common to all humans

3, 2-hour webinars

Learn how to write your next Federal Aid report, briefing paper, or just about any other document using 25-30% fewer words, in plain English, and without losing any critical content. This webinar series includes numerous exercises to practice the techniques you learn and time to apply what you learn to one of your own documents. You will finally understand how writing in active voice uses fewer words to say what you want to say more directly and concisely. This webinar series meets three times, with homework assignments after each webinar session.

4, 2-hour webinars

Required Text: Inclusify by Dr. Stefanie K. Johnson

The Power of Inclusion webinar series was researched and developed by several AFWA National Faculty members to provide participants with a relevant, experiential learning opportunity. The focus is on the individual as the primary tool in increasing diversity and generating greater inclusion in the workplace. As the individual gains greater awareness of their role in the system, each will begin to share insights and develop the means to make change. Individuals will create tools and/or best practices that move the needle on the value of uniqueness and a sense of belonging at work, strengthening agency culture. This experience will offer insights to fully appreciate and understand the benefits of not only diversity, but also the need to be more inclusive. The aim is to follow-up with participants quarterly or semi-annually to assess, measure, and evaluate best practices. The MAT will continue to add to the toolkit of interventions and best practices after each webinar series.

2-hour Webinar

Have you ever thought about the value of working more closely with the public as you go about your work? Whose resources are we managing?Join us as we explore this idea of involving the public in our work. We’ll examine what it means, why we should consider it and then review some best practices to help us try it out. We will draw on several resources including Bleikers’ Systematic Development of Informed Consent, materials from the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2), and a book by James L. Creighton, “The Public Participation Handbook”. According to Hans Bleiker of the Institute for Participatory Management and Planning, some of our projects will be doomed without public involvement. In today’s world that is a valid and sobering concern. Many state fish and wildlife agencies use public participation techniques in a variety of ways to inform, consult, involve, collaborate and/or empower stakeholders.

Objectives Include:

• Show why public involvement is mission-critical
• Identify the elements of fostering relationships and successful conservation projects
• Explore resources and best practices for public involvement

2-hour Webinar

Self-care is imperative if conservationists are to be at their best to overcome the environmental and conservation challenges of today. Being your best self means prioritizing your health and wellbeing before caring for others and our land, water and air. Self-care is not selfish, it is necessary. Our self-care practices (or lack of) are influenced by deeply held beliefs, attitudes and upbringing. During this webinar, we will assess our attitudes and current situation in self-care to help us:

• Examine what self-care and wellbeing are and are not
• Identify personal beliefs around self-care and wellbeing
• Determine barriers to successful self-care plans

2, 3-hour webinars

Social location influences our identity, our felt sense of self and our lens to the world. When it comes to relevancy, our social location is important in understanding (or not understanding) the experiences of others with very different identities, values, beliefs and attitudes about nature and outdoor recreation. An individual’s social location is defined by a combination of factors such as gender, race, social class, age, ability, religion, sexual orientation, and geographic location. Therefore, no two people have the same social location.

This webinar series will allow participants to understand their own social location. We will also examine power positions when it comes to conservation related identities, such as recreation participation, wildlife value orientation, access, organization type, authority and education. We will use what we learned about ourselves and each other to discuss how we meet people, of all backgrounds and experience levels, outside. The objectives of the webinar will be to:

• Claim our social location and power position in conservation.
• Discuss what power and position mean for relevancy.
• Learn about and practice cultural humility.
• Reflect on social location, power position and belonging in the conservation community.

This is a two-part series that includes a minor pre-requisite homework assignment. Two, 3-hour sessions held one week apart to offer time for reflection.