December 2022 Director’s Corner

This is a special Streamline (our last of the year) during a special year (CRC’s 50th anniversary), and so a bit of reflection seems appropriate. The Roundtable/Streamline topics took us on a journey, and a short recounting of that journey illuminates a seasonality to our thinking and our search for navigation waypoints as we move through our work. Let’s take a look….

We started this year’s series of Roundtables with a resolution to look at the “people” part of the restoration equation; we began with two Roundtables related to social sciences and behavior change (Behavior and the Bay and Aligning Behavior for the Bay). We lifted the mists of March with a soulful exploration of photography (Bringing the Bay Home) and what we see when we allow the mists to lift: a reminder of the call of this place that we call home.

As Spring arrived, seedlings and growth was on our mind, and we explored how to further grow passion and stewardship in the young professionals that we develop for the future (CRC’s 50-Year-Long Role in Developing Environmental Leaders).

As the rains and warmth of Summer swept in, we extracted lessons from our history with extremes of both (Learning from Disaster and Beating the Heat), with an intervening look at the place where stewardship and science meet (Community Science).

With Fall came a focus on gathering, from gathering collective knowledge on how to provide remarkable opportunity (A Framework for Growth in Internships) to providing a space for brave conversation (Listening and Learning) to gathering around a particular place to accelerate learning (Targeting Resources to Accelerate Restoration), to gathering stories of developing careers and professionals from underserved sectors of students (such our first C-StREAM Alumni Highlight video).

We now enter the natural reflective period of Winter and are returning to our people theme (Growing Positive Action – register here); this bookending speaks to how everything that we do in the restoration effort is always bookended by people, their values, and their collective actions.

I like to think that the series of topics and conversations is reflective of a deeper connection to the cycles of our natural world along with our unique human context; it certainly seems that way. It’s been an honor and a privilege to be in conversation with you, and we can’t wait to see the seasonality of topics of the coming year. If you have a topic that you’d like to see explored, please let us know.