Virginia Natural Resources Leadership Institute

The Virginia Natural Resources Leadership Institute is a professional development program for leaders confronted with Virginia’s most pressing natural resource issues who seek new skills in conflict resolution and collaborative problem solving. We invite you to learn about VNRLI and hope you will join us as a program Fellow or regional session participant! 

VNRLI brings together natural resource managers from across Virginia’s communities to engage in productive dialogue and collaborative problem solving.  Our goal is to help these leaders effectively manage, conserve, and protect Virginia’s natural resources by developing a network of natural resource managers across sectors who can solve problems and build consensus around environmental issues and move beyond conflict to find creative solutions. It achieves this by bringing together a cross-section of state leaders from the public, private and community/ nonprofit sectors who meet consistently for a yearlong series of workshops and training seminars.

The workshops and training seminars draw on a wide range of teaching methodologies, from mini-lectures, panels, and large group and small group exercises. This process tends to emphasize hands-on experiential learning techniques that give participants opportunities to develop and practice skills taught in the classroom. Case studies and field trips are used to make the natural resources issues come alive to participants in a way that does not occur in a classroom. Lastly, in some states, at the end of the year participants undertake a mentored “practicum,” which is a project involving conflict resolution at some level that they will initiate and facilitate to completion.