The Role of a Weaver: Creating Results on Community Issues

by Deborah Linnell, Director of Programs

One of the many insights gleaned from Third Sector New England’s Capacity Building Fund (CBF) is just how vital building relationships and developing trust are to successful cross-organizational work within and across nonprofits. Begun in 2004, CBF provides funding, technical assistance and peer-to-peer support to 5 or more groups to help them learn effective ways to collaborate around a common cause. By supporting the formation of these networks, CBF seeks to strengthen the organizations’ ability to confront challenges and maximize opportunities more effectively than the groups could individually.

In network theory, people who hold and develop relationships are called weavers. Weavers are people who span boundaries either within non-profit and other organizations or externally with other groups. They are the folks that people describe as “natural networkers” – they span both internal and external organizational boundaries.

Listening and Connecting

Meg Kerr has been central to 3 learning networks funded by the Capacity Building Fund. What is core to how Megg works is that she believes the sum is greater than the parts. And she knows that groups that share a similar concern (in this case the environment) can cross boundaries and work together – if someone takes the time and care to engage with the “parts.”

Meg has initiated, with others, several major statewide environmental initiatives (the most current being a transportation coalition) by carrying out listening projects. She takes the time to meet with and really listen to others. She does not come with a preconceived agenda to try and get them on board She, instead, slowly pieces together consensus about an agenda by listening to individuals and connecting them to each other.

The Headwaters

Meg holds a degree in environmental biology and began working for North Carolina state government on water quality issues in 1980. When someone in the governor’s office wanted to start a program called Stream Watch, where people were asked to “watch” their rivers for water quality, Meg was asked to run it. The Stream Watch project was her first foray into citizen action and attempting to connect what government is doing to what people care about.

Meg quickly learned that Stream Watch was not a new idea. There were many citizens already watching their rivers – and the people knew more than she did. Meg says, “They did not need the government to make them real.” The project was an eye-opener and its lessons foundational in how Meg has approached her work over the last 2 decades.

After working for the Environmental Projection Agency in Washington, D.C., Meg and her husband wanted to move back to New England to raise their family. By 2004, Rhode Island had passed the Rivers Council Statute that created a rivers classification plan for and a charge for the empowerment of watershed groups.

The Confluence

Meg, who was already working on river quality monitoring projects, was interested in strengthening the voice of citizens volunteering in watershed and river associations – a vision she had built with Rupert Friday. Meg had previously met Rupert, who was coordinating the state’s land trust association, when they both worked at the same quasi-government coastal resource oversight group. They solidified a friendship there that led to their discussions of an engaged citizenry. Now she was leading the state’s Rivers Council, and Rupert was leading the land trust association.

Rupert and Meg thought bigger than just their particular environment niche – be it land or watershed/river preservation. They could each see more similarities between the fields than differences.

• Both efforts were grassroots; the organizations mostly all volunteer.
• Both land trust and watershed groups were equally concerned with the issue of conservation.
• Their hope for the world around them was similar: watershed groups own land; and land trusts protect rivers.

Rupert and Meg began collaborative work that continues to this day.

Together they developed a conference that brought together the mostly volunteer watershed/river and land trust groups for co-education. The highly successful conference attracts over 300 people each year .

Crossing Boundaries

Their work together led to a vision for a project that focused on developing back office support that would cross boundaries among watershed groups and land trusts which the Capacity Building Fund included among its very first cohort of grantees. The effort and work has been carefully documented over the last 6 years. People have met monthly since 2004 and have learned a tremendous amount about what it takes to share back office services.

Today, as a result of this work, 7 groups share donor management software. And they are moving to a user group listserv as the groups take over their coordination and Meg and Rupert step back.

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