Strategic Facilitation
Someone must take the lead role in facilitating overall program development. The tasks involved include organizing meetings, building ideas based on new input, writing proposals, ensuring that stakeholders are satisfied and supportive, drafting budgets, and generating solutions to problems that emerge.
Strategic facilitation strikes a fine balance between active leadership, astute organizational awareness and skillful facilitation. In the higher education context, and especially in relation to the development of a new program, the most effective leaders are people who can execute necessary tasks while helping others to take ownership of the product. As the saying goes, a good leader can accomplish almost anything if she or he does not mind who takes the credit.
If there is a person or organization at your college or university whose core mission it is to green the campus, they may be in the best position to facilitate new program development efforts. Their fundamental role is to facilitate organizational change, meaning they are in a good position to strategize, build partnerships, and generally support and enhance efforts to get new programs up and running.
If there is no such person or entity at your institution or if the existing entity does not wish to support new ideas, do not despair! You will need to expand your own leadership efforts and reach out for other sources of support. If you are starting alone, the advice provided in this section will help you build the community of support necessary to get a green living program (GLP) or student internship program (SIP) off the ground.
How will your GLP or SIP fit into the campus landscape? We provide some tips and key questions to consider when surveying the organizational framework of your college or university.
This section discusses who your most useful partners might be and how to approach them, as well as what kinds of support are not necessarily helpful.
Building a community of support means allowing your original vision to evolve to incorporate other peoples' ideas. Here we describe this and other subtleties of program development.
Maximizing the staying power of your new program depends on the partners you bring together in the early stages of program development. Here we provide recommendations on how to structure for success.
When trying to gather support for your new program, you will hear "no," or some variation thereof, over and over again. In this section, we offer a few thoughts on how to prevent this little word from putting up major roadblocks.