As pressures on Virginia's natural riches mount, our community leaders face the increasingly difficult challenge of protecting and managing resources for multiple uses. The environmental arena invokes passion because the consequences of these issues are so profound to individual and community life. Virginia's communities need to find ways to strengthen community ties and to help conflicting interests reach both common ground and higher ground where qualities such as fairness, integrity, and responsibility are both expected and rewarded. Conflict can be resolved productively when disputants become more knowledgeable about public issues, communicate in a more meaningful and effective way, open the debate to include all stakeholders, and negotiate in principled ways to settle disagreements. Our hopes for VNRLI, and ways of making these hopes become reality, are described below.

The VNRLI Vision

Virginia's communities will engage in productive dialogue and collaborative problem solving of natural resource issues important to community sustainability and, thus, be able to effectively manage, conserve, and protect Virginia's natural resources.

The VNRLI Mission

To develop leaders in the Commonwealth who can help groups involved in contentious natural resources issues move beyond conflict toward consensus building and collaborative problem solving.

Objectives

To Create A Leadership Network of People:

• Who are engaged in working with Virginia's natural resources at all levels, from the scientific to the policy levels;
  
• Who are drawn from all sectors of activity - local, state, and federal government, elected officials, industry and private small businesses, academia, civic organizations, nonprofit environmental organizations, and individual citizen activists;
  
• Who will earn each other's trust while respecting each others different perspectives;
  
• Who will be able to call on each other over the years for assistance and ideas; and
  
• Who will have the leadership skills needed to engage in collaborative problem solving around environmental issues, to move beyond conflict, and to find creative solutions.

Special Thanks

The 2008-2009 VNRLI is Funded in Part By ...

• An Urban and Community Forestry Grant from the Virginia Department of Forestry
• A grant from the Dominion Foundation
• A Chesapeake Bay License Plate Fund Grant from the Virginia DLS
  
• Support from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries
• Scholarship support from the George Beals Leadership Fund of the Virginia Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts
• Gifts from VNRLI Alumni