What do you get when you put 40 local environmentalists in a room together for 6 hours?That may sound like the punchline to a joke, but it was serious business for the people who gathered at McHenry College on March 17th for the inaugural McHenry County Environmental Summit.
Excellent facilitator, Peter Lopatin (who declared himself to be "Switzerland" since he did not have allegiances to any specific organizations), guided the group through several exercises to create a priority agenda for projects that the group of organizations could pursue to advance a stronger environmental agenda in the county.
Peter Benkendorf, Catalyst at Involvement Advocacy, was the event's instigator, working with Maia Tipton from the McHenry County Schools Environmental Education Program, Bill Donato from the McHenry County Defenders, Janet Trafelet from the Alliance for Land, Agriculture and Water, and myself, to organize the event.
About 20 environmental organizations - some non-profit, some government - were identified in McHenry County. Each group was asked to have 1 or 2 representatives at the event. The spirit of the event was to try and build a community of organizations that work together on certain projects in order to help make McHenry County a leader in environmental sustainability within 10 years.
After giving each organization 3-5 minutes to describe their mission, strengths & challenges, the group dove into a traditional SWOT analysis, calling out Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats that the community of enviro organizations faces. The SWOT analysis then led to small group work identifying specific actions that the group could take to advance a common agenda.
Actions Identified included:
- Create an Annual Scorecard for the environment. This could look at air quality, water quality, land protection, development regulations, enforcement of ordinances, and myriad other topics. The idea would be to move the county towards sustainability by recognizing the good things that are happening, and challenging the bad.
- Setting up a local list serve and webforum for environmentalists to share information with each other. Right now there is a lot of information & experience in the community of people and organizations, but no effective way to share that information.
- Working with communities to change ordinances to make conservation design the standard rather than the exception.
Next steps will be to develop a working group around each of the action items, and to start moving the agenda forward - together!
Participating Organizations:
Alliance for Land, Agriculture & Water
Barrington Hills Conservation Trust
Boone Creek Watershed Alliance
Cary Park District
Crystal Lake Park District
Friends of the Fox (Invited)
Fox River Ecosystem Partnership
Illinois Dept of Natural Resources - Private lands program
Kishwaukee River Ecosystem Partnership
McHenry County Conservation District
MC Conservation Foundation
MC Defenders
MC Schools Environmental Education Program
MC Soil & Water Conservation District
Nippersink Creek Planning Committee (Invited)
PACE
Sierra Club, Illinois Chapter, River Sentinels
The Land Conservancy of McHenry County
The Wildflower Preservation & Propagation Committee
USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service
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