Coastal Solutions Retreat for Collaborative Leadership

By: Ballantyne Puin – 2023 Coastal Solutions Fellow

Have you heard about collaborative leadership or the Art of Hosting?

In the Coastal Solutions Program, we as fellows have the opportunity to strengthen our leadership capacities through various tools, one of which are the leadership retreats. For a week in Costa Rica (from May 19 to 24), along with our program director, Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta, the Fellows of 2023, Juanita Fonseca (2021 fellow), and Manuela Erazo (2020 fellow), we had the experience of participating in our Collaborative Leadership Retreat, where we learned about frameworks, models, tools, and methodologies for reflection, collaboration, activation of the collective intelligence, and wise action.

The Art of Hosting is a methodology and community of practice that focuses on inclusion, meaningful dialogue, and collaboration to address complexity and problems in any area and create resilient communities. It promotes the participation of all components of a system in decision-making, understanding that solutions and innovations do not reside in a single leader or point of view but in our broader collective intelligence. It seeks to create environments where people can thrive, feel valued, and contribute to the common good.

At the retreat, we had the great experience of having the design, facilitation, and instruction from Josefina Maturana, Emy Rivero, and Karen Méndez, from the organization CuartoEco, based in Chile and Colombia. CuartoEco has experts from different countries who specialize in collaborative leadership training and promote authentic, safe, honest, and close-knit spaces where transparency is encouraged to activate capacities, inspiration, and the construction of effective solutions.

Our retreat was enriched by the participation of experts in conservation, ecology, community processes, and science communication from various institutions in Costa Rica, who kindly shared their experiences, challenges, and achievements in conservation with us. With the support and guidance of Gabriela Mora and Fresia Villalobos from the organization MarViva, we also had the opportunity to visit three conservation projects in the coastal area of the Puntarenas region, which are implemented hand in hand with the community, with innovative mechanisms to generate benefits for both wildlife and people.

Thank you, CuartoEco, for designing and facilitating this great experience! Thanks to the various admirable people and conservation projects we met in Costa Rica, and to the Coastal Solutions Program for strengthening our capacities and providing us with tools to address the conservation challenges of coastal habitats in Latin America.