The Collaborative Leadership Program at the Puget Sound Institute (PSI) will receive almost $500,000 to train the next generation of collaborative policy makers. The new project will build on lessons from Puget Sound’s groundbreaking history of salmon co-management and other natural resource policies.
The support comes from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Puget Sound Fund through the Habitat Strategic Initiative Lead (HSIL), which is a collaborative partnership between the Washington State Departments of Natural Resources (DNR) and Fish & Wildlife (DFW). The funds, designated for mid-2025 through mid-2027, support a proposal called Developing Collaborative Leaders for Puget Sound. PSI’s partners on this effort will include the Agriculture and Forestry Education Foundation, UW College of the Environment’s EarthLab, UW Tacoma Milgard School of Business, and UW Evans School of Public Policy & Governance.
“Puget Sound is where natural resource collaborative governance began,” said project leader Michael Kern, Director of Special Projects at PSI, referring to the resolution of a conflict on the Snohomish River in the mid-1970s that is widely recognized as the first successful multiparty natural resource collaboration. Around the same time, other pivotal moments in state history such as the Boldt Decision (U.S. v. Washington) led to changes that forced groups with diverse and often conflicting interests — such as tribes and state agencies — to ultimately begin working together and co-managing natural resources.
Two years ago, Kern began a project at PSI, in partnership with TVW, Washington’s public affairs broadcaster, to document that history through a series of ~60 oral history interviews with many of the leaders who helped forged the collaborative policies that we know today.
Interviews covered topics ranging from salmon to agriculture and timber, and many other areas. Interviewees were asked what processes they had been part of and what they recalled, which leaders and regions of the state had been important to that history, what collaborative leadership meant to them, and what hopes and concerns they had for the future of collaborative policy making. Those one-to-two-hour oral histories are now archived at UW Libraries Special Collections, and available online from the Collaborative Leadership Program website.

The interviews served as the basis for a recent documentary film, “Finding Common Ground: Collaborative Leadership in Washington State,” co-produced by Kern and TVW. The process included consultation with a Tribal Advisory Committee, to avoid inaccuracies or insensitivities in how tribal history and culture were covered or portrayed. The film includes excerpts from interviews with 40 collaborative leaders. The film was previewed at four well-attended and well-received events in fall 2024 and is now available on TVW on demand (tvw.org). Besides Kern (Co-Producer/Executive Producer), the project team included PSI Director Joel Baker, Jennifer Huntley of TVW (Co-Producer), TVW President Renee Radcliff Sinclair (Executive Producer), Nisqually Indian Tribe Natural Resource Director David Troutt (Executive Producer), and mediator/UW Center for Urban Waters Board Chair Jim Waldo (Executive Producer).
Those interviews will lay the groundwork for curricula that will train and teach the current and upcoming workforce about collaborative leadership, using Puget Sound examples and case studies. “That important work has ensured this vital knowledge is not lost, and that both current and future generations benefit from this wisdom,” said Kern. “But the challenges we face in achieving habitat outcomes to protect and restore Puget Sound are complex,” he said. “The workforce implementing strategies to achieve those outcomes must have collaborative skills to successfully navigate conflict, understand interdependencies, and build relationships.”
The training will also create opportunities for interaction between the next generation and their elders, exploring how collaborative approaches have solved past conflicts, and considering how they, as upcoming leaders, can adapt and apply this leadership to meet their generation’s interests and needs. Curricula will be developed in different formats for both mid-career professionals and University of Washington students.
Kern said one of the goals of the project will be to overcome misunderstandings about what collaborative leadership is and is not. “There are a lot of myths about collaboration,” he said. “One of them is that it is the same thing as compromise. People are sometimes reluctant to enter into a collaborative process, because they think it means they will have to keep trading things away that they value, that they won’t get what they want or need.” A collaborative process might involve some compromise, Kern said, but “a real collaborative process is one where I hang on to my interests. I just let go of my preconceived positions about how best to achieve them. I’m not compromising my interests, but I also want to know what your interests are, because I’m trying to work with you, and everybody else, to find a solution set that will get us all where we want to go.”
Rather than being a relic of the past, Kern said the wisdom of collaborative leadership is as relevant now as it has ever been. “I think it’s a matter of scope and scale,” he said. “I think that you used to be able to get a small group of people around a table and focus on maybe three or four different interests. Maybe you could effectively take on something like salmon co-management. When you expanded that table to include the tribes, for example, you really were able to get some things done that weren’t possible when those doors were shut. But you take on a challenge like climate change, and you have so many more interests represented. It’s just so much more multifaceted and so much more complex.”
Once developed, Kern hopes the curriculum can then be replicated and shared with other institutions in Puget Sound and beyond.
For more information, or to help support the project, contact Program Lead Michael Kern at mkern@uw.edu, or visit the program website at www.pugetsoundinstitute.org/collaborative-leadership-project/.
This project has been funded wholly or in part by the United States Environmental Protection Agency under assistance agreement PC-01J89501 through the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. The contents of this document do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, nor does mention of trade names or commercial products constitute endorsement or recommendation for use.