1. Strong Environmental Track Record: Eric doesn’t just talk a good talk, he gets results. Check out hist long list of environmental accomplishments.

2. Leadership: Eric took the lead as Council President, a job that not only tested him as a leader, but will prepare him well in his role as Mayor.

3. Neighborhood Focus: Eric worked to improve the quality of life in all of the neighborhoods in his 13^th Council District (I’m a resident of one of those, Echo Park). I’m super excited about the soon to be opened and restored Echo Park Lake!

4. Coalition Building: Eric has built an impressive campaign for mayor, uniting a broad cross section of people and institutions. He used the same approach to get things done in his district.

5. Bicycling Support: I worked closely with Eric and his staff when I directed the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. Eric has a great line in this video my friend George made from the most recent CicLAvia. (lots of other local superstars in this video as well).

6. Engaging Angelenos: Before the primary, Eric’s campaign asked if I could facilitate some salons with various local leaders to generate ideas on issues related to water, energy, community development, transportation and education. This innovative, engaging approach generated ideas that helped him develop his agenda as mayor.

7. Grassroots Support: Related to engaging Angelenos, Eric and his campaign have walked the streets of Los Angeles talking and listening to voters. His people-powered campaign reflects the diversity of Los Angeles.

8. Immigration Reform Support: He cares about this issue and has served as an advisor to President Obama.

9. Creative Solutions: In the recent debate at USC, Eric mentioned Driverless Cars as a potential transportation solution, a technology with enormous potential to transform our streets.

10. Love for Los Angeles!: Like me, Eric is from here and loves it. The passion he has for our fair city and his understanding of our past and present will equip him as he engages all of us to participate in creating our own civic future.

Remember to vote on May 21^st. I encourage you to vote for Eric Garcetti. If you’re planning on voting for Eric, I’m curious to hear why you support him. Thanks!

A diverse set of stakeholders comprise this collaborative: the Los Angeles Community Development Department, the City of Los Angeles Workforce Investment Board, the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, the USC Metamorphosis project, Occidental College’s Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, KCET Departures, L.A. Conservation Corps, the L.A. River Revitalization Corporation, Tierra West Advisors Inc. and the National Parks Service.

As I mentioned in a previous post, collaborative change efforts require their own set of dynamics and challenges. With this in mind, I interviewed lead partners prior to the retreat and developed an engaging agenda to build stronger relationships, explore ways in which partners can most effectively support each other and enhance communication. As with all of my retreats, I facilitated a mix of large and small group sessions, this time incorporating drawing and kinesthetic learning.

One of my favorite moments was involved facilitating an exercise in which everyone had to collaborate as a group to prevent the balloons from falling on the ground. This involved active communication, laughter, movement, strategy and fun. We debriefed and related the challenges of the exercise to challenges involved collaboration. One challenge with collaboration is each organization brings their own diverse culture and norms to the table. Each has their own “normal”. But my “normal” might be different than your “normal”. Effective collaboration builds trust among its participants as they negotiate working with each other over time. A retreat is a great place to discuss different approaches and ideas for more effective partnership. After discussing the big picture as a group, I split the large group into five smaller groups and each developed a set of strategies that they later prioritized as a large group.

I always like it when the location of the retreat relates to the work of the retreat. We held the retreat within the North East section of the LA River at Golden Road Brewery. We heard from Tony, it’s co-owner. Hosting it at this location made for a seamless transition into a more informal happy hour in which the conversations continued over some locally brewed ale.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the Collaborative’s River Bike + Walk Spectacular on April 27th! If you want even more riding along the Los Angeles River, I encourage you to join the Los Angeles River Ride, hosted by the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition.

I’m collaborating with Adonia Lugo on this project, who is bringing the tools of cultural anthropology to better understand how the bicycle movement grew in Los Angeles. Specifically, “this event will give community members and researchers an opportunity to learn about the human connections that changed the landscape for bicycling in Los Angeles. The event uses a tool of cultural anthropology, ethnography, to engage a group in a dialog about the growth of the bike movement in Los Angeles. It’s not designed to generate a comprehensive history of the movement, but rather a deeper understanding of some of its milestones and what contributed to these.”

Together, we designed an interactive evening. To start, we’ll hear from some local legends sharing their stories of key milestones that grew the bike movement in Los Angeles. We’re defining a milestone as something that happened that built momentum for other things to happen, ultimately creating a movement that in turn shaped a larger culture change.

Rather than a traditional panel format, we will start with one person telling their story of the bike movement and reflecting on a key milestone. After that person has talked for a few minutes, another panelist is invited to add onto the conversation with a “Yes, and…”, and then they begin sharing their story for a few minutes until a panelist who hasn’t spoken yet hears something they relate to, and say “Yes, and..”. The idea is everyone participates and builds off of each others’ stories to tell the larger story of the bike movement. I’m excited! This format facilitates the generation of “our story” vs. “my story”. This format was inspired by a fun “Yes, and” improv exercise I did with the Pablove Foundation at their staff retreat.

The challenge with this kind of event is that there are so many people who have contributed to the bike movement that narrowing it down to a handful will by no means tell a definitive history of the movement. But together, the idea is to weave together a story with some shared themes to better understand the overall movement.

This is where everyone else who attends the event comes in. We designed the evening to have an interactive portion where everyone who attends is asked to add their own milestone to the timeline (which we’ll have posted on the wall). The idea is for discussion to follow between participants, panelists and researches in small, informal discussions.

After that, we’ll reflect together on common themes. I invite you to attend. All of this is helping create an actual timeline that charts the history of the bike movement in Los Angeles (here’s my six reasons making the case for LA being a bike city). I’m super excited to facilitate a panel with folks I have such respect for and am excited to experience the learning that comes through this conversation.

(Notes on the images used in this blog post: 1) Overview timeline created for the upcoming Building a Bike Movement in Autopia event, 2) A hand-drawn timeline of the bike movement I drew sometime around 2007, 3) A hand-drawn map Joe Linton drew of a bike ride celebrating LACBC victories during my time as executive director 4) + 5) LACBC milestones during my time as ED published in LACBC’s Bicycle Times’ newsletter)

“Los Angeles has taken great strides over the past several decades to become a greener and more livable community. Improvements in air quality, public transit, clean energy, solid waste recycling, greenhouse gas emissions, water quality, and in other areas have meant a better quality of life for many. But there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done to transform Los Angeles into an environmentally sustainable and healthful place to live for all of its residents.” (Vision LA 2021 Report). How this work gets done to transform Los Angeles into a sustainable city is of great interest to me. Specifically, how can a broad cross-section of organizations collaborate to maximize their impact?

Over the last decade, numerous collaboratives have launched in Southern California to address issues related to urban sustainability: improving access to healthy food, revitalizing the Los Angeles River, building healthy communities and many more. Each has its own creation story, membership, processes and impact on the community. These initiatives also include their own set of challenges, pitfalls and risk. Numerous questions remain on what exactly is needed to ensure these collaboratives  create lasting, positive change. My research will look into best practices for facilitating successful collaboration that leads to sustainable development in Los Angeles. Specifically, I’m interested in the role that leadership plays in collaboration, and what effective organizations look like that have a mission of supporting collaboration.

I’m reading up a storm on the topic and am happy to share some of my initial findings with you:

In her book “Collaborting: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems”, Barbara Gray notes “collaboration is a process in which those parties with a stake in the problem actively seek a mutually determined solution”. Her book lays a theoretical groundwork of ingredients needed for successful collaboration, including the process for starting and maintaining a collaborative, managing power relationships, resolving conflict and designing the collaborative. Gray notes the potential value of a “third party” to help during the various stages of collaboration. This role potentially includes assessing overall readiness to collaborate, getting parties to the table, minimizing resistance, ensuring effective representation, establishing a climate of trust, modeling openness, designing/managing the negotiation process, managing data and getting consensus.

“What is generally agreed upon by researchers, practitioners, and members that participate in Inter-organization networks is that these structures are difficult to form and manage.” (Ainsworth). Huxham takes it a step further in Managing to Collaborate: “Unless you see THE POTENTIAL for real collaborative advantage (i.e. that you can achieve something really worthwhile that you couldn’t otherwise achieve) it’s most efficient to do it on your own.”

Huxham goes on to propose a theory of collaborative advantage and argues effective management includes managing aims, negotiating purpose, membership structures and dynamics, coping with trust, using power, issues of identity and leadership. All of these are potential guide posts for anyone seeking to manage a collaborative.

“Unlike most collaborations, collective impact initiatives involve a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants.” (Kania & Kramer). They continue “The backbone organization requires a dedicated staff separate from the participating organizations who can plan, manage, and support the initiative through ongoing facilitation, technology and communications support, data collection and reporting and handling the myriad logistical and administrative details needed for the initiative to function smoothly.”

Paul Williams goes another step further and identifies specific “skills, abilities, experience and personal characteristics” of what he calls “Boundary Spanners”, which include: building sustainable relationships, managing through influencing and negotiation, managing complexity and interdependencies and managing roles, accountabilities and motivations.

I’m really excited to continue my research on the subject of collaboration and am in the process of developing a specific set of questions to research. After that, I will move forward with a methodology to understand best practices and ultimately share my findings. I plan to share my learning in future blog posts. If you’re interested in collaboration or have any thoughts to share on the subject, I welcome your feedback. Thanks!

Relationship Building: Like the retreat I led last year for the LA Neighborhood Land Trust, the number of folks on the Pablove staff has grown quickly. We spent quality time giving staff the opportunity to get to know each other better.

Three of my favorite activities included:

Mapping Migrations: We did a fun exercise where we mapped where everyone was born, where they currently live and the migrations they made in between. We held our retreat at one of my favorite places to retreat in Los Angeles, the Audubon Center at Debs Park so the migration theme fit in well.

Iprov: Post-lunch, we gathered in a circle and did some fun, engaging improv exercises. These generated a lot of laughter and some really good discussion. We did a couple of variations of the “Yes, and” improve, a engaging activity that generated an interconnected story and good ideas.

Social Styles: We went through an exercise where I had each staff member take some time to fill out an assessment of their social style which charts out their communication styles. As a group, each staff member shared their style and we had an informative discussion. I paired up folks with similar styles along with folks with different styles and we had a really engaging debrief conversation. Part of this discussion occured in pairs on a beautiful walk on a nearby trail.

Altogether, the retreat rocked! As we gathered in a circle at the end as the sun was setting, folks shared how the retreat helped connect everyone in a meaningful way. It was like everyone was giving each other a Valentines day gift, and it felt great both to give and receive.