Member Spotlight on Beth Tener

Our October Member Spotlight features the work of Beth Tener who has been collaborating with LLC and other partners on our Leadership and Networks publication as part of the Leadership for a New Era initiative.  Beth has been a contributing member of the Boston Leadership Learning Circle, and is a visionary and practical facilitator of networks in and around New England.

 As Principal of New Directions Collaborative, Beth became interested in networks and leadership after 20 years of experience working in business, government and non-profits to advance sustainability goals. As Executive Director of Sustainable Step New England (SSNE), she facilitated the Boston Green and Healthy Building Network, convened by the Barr Foundation, which organized ten environmental and health care non-profits and the City of Boston. These organizations all had the same goal:  to promote green and healthy buildings in Boston; however, they were not working together.  Beth served as the facilitator of the network and helped align their advocacy efforts by mapping their strategies and identifying areas of overlap and gaps, facilitating group meetings, and using social network analysis to help the group see its interconnections.

Beth’s current work with New Directions Collaborative (NDC), uses network approaches to:

•                    Educate members of peer organizations and help them collaborate on their sustainability goals.

•                    Facilitate collaboration across organizations and sectors to enable progress on large-scale complex challenges such as climate change.

•                    Provide the people leading these changes with the inspiration, tools, and membd to sustain them in their work.

The Collaborative combines competencies in three areas: sustainability strategy and training, how to catalyze social networks to advance change, and interactive facilitation techniques, such as the World Café. They are exploring new ways to combine social network analysis with in- person conferences using open-space facilitation techniques to enable much greater levels of connection and collaboration among participants around shared interests.

NDC facilitates place-based networks of peer organizations that have similar operations, to provide a regular place for peer learning and sharing results of their actions with peers.  A successful model is Boston Green Tourism (BGT), led by NDC consultant Dan Ruben. BGT helps its 40 Greater Boston hotels improve their environmental performance by organizing seminars every 6 weeks at local hotels, providing cutting edge information, and enabling members to share their successes and challenges in going green. An added benefit of the meetings is they provide professional networking opportunities. BGT member hotels have made remarkable gains in performance and their achievements help position Greater Boston as a destination for environmentally-minded conventions and leisure travelers.

A recent blog on NDC’s web site, The Power of Potlucks, highlights another successful example of a place-based network to promote strong local food systems in Hardwick, Vermont.