Something Isn't Right: The Need for Collaborative Training

Devin Landry serves as coordinator of the California Landscape Stewardship Network. In this role, he supports the Network’s mission of advancing cross-boundary, landscape-scale stewardship through tracking the Network’s various initiatives, drafting network-wide communications, and event planning. Devin also provides facilitative support to the Network for Landscape Conservation’s Catalyst Fund Peer Learning Cohort, as well as to the Center for Natural Resources & Environmental Policy at the University of Montana.  Prior to working in landscape conservation and stewardship, Devin conducted wildlife research across the U.S. Northern Rockies. Whether it’s his background in research, policy, or connecting the two through practice, he maintains a passion for understanding how people connect with nature and place to care for the land and their communities. Devin holds a B.A. in English and Religious Studies from Skidmore College and a M.S. in Wildlife Biology from the University of Montana, where he also gained certification in the Natural Resources Conflict Resolution Program.  

Shawn Johnson is Managing Director of the Center for Natural Resources & Environmental Policy at the University of Montana and co-director of the Center’s graduate certificate program in Natural Resources Conflict Resolution.  Shawn organizes and leads strategic planning and capacity building workshops for a wide variety of organizations focused on natural resource policy and management and has served as a facilitator and mediator on issues ranging from land use planning and forest management to conservation priority setting and regional collaboration. For the past ten years, he has helped advance a joint effort between the Center and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy on regional collaboration and large landscape conservation. The joint effort explores questions of policy, leadership, and governance at regional or landscape scales, where there is often a mismatch between the scale of an existing challenge or opportunity and that of existing organizations and jurisdictions. In May 2011, Shawn helped organize and convene a group of large landscape conservation practitioners that led to a new network of practitioners throughout North America who are working to improve community and conservation outcomes at the large landscape scale -- the Practitioners’ Network for Large Landscape Conservation. Shawn is co-author, with Matthew McKinney, of Working Across Boundaries: People, Nature, and Regions (Lincoln Institute, 2009). He also contributed to Large Landscape Conservation, A Strategic Framework for Policy and Action (Lincoln Institute, 2010) and Remarkable Beyond Borders: People and Landscapes in the Crown of the Continent (Sonoran Institute, 2010). Prior to his work at the Center, Shawn earned a Master’s degree in Public Affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and spent three years as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Max Baucus.