The most impactful and meaningful community-centered environmental improvement projects are those that engage broad coalitions of community partners – community organizations and neighborhood groups, residents, business owners, local leaders, and more. Often, these projects require collaboration and a process for shared decision-making among its leaders – but there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this type of collaboration.

As a collaboratively-led partnership and peer-to-peer learning community, the Urban Waters Learning Network has gone through several iterations of shared leadership. We’ve wrestled – and re-wrestled – with all sorts of questions: How do we ensure that we all have the same information? How do we keep aligned toward our end goals while working on separate projects? How do we work through disagreements? How do we prioritize when resources are limited? 

We’ve been refining our shared leadership model for over a decade, and it’s looked different in every season. We’ve come to our current model through years of experimenting, honest conversations, missteps, and learning by doing.

What we’ve built is not a one-size-fits-all framework but it’s something that works for us, and might spark ideas for you!

This blog is our way of sharing our shared leadership journey: not just the framework, but the experiences and reflections that shaped it. We hope these reflections will offer a bit of inspiration as you consider what shared leadership could look like in your work.

what is the urban waters learning network?

The Urban Waters Learning Network (UWLN) is a national network of people across the country working to restore and improve urban waterways. Since our founding in 2010 through a collaboration between Groundwork USA and River Network, we’ve built a space where water leaders across the country can come together to learn from one another, support each other’s work, and pursue lasting change.

Shared leadership at uwln

The success of our programming is contingent on collaboration and collective action, and from the outset, we recognized that this vision calls for a leadership model that embodies this commitment to building consensus and collaborating across a range of perspectives and experiences. Shared leadership has become the foundation of how we make decisions, support each other, and stay accountable to our mission and to the communities we serve.

Instead of relying on one organization or individual setting direction, our decisions are made together. At the organizational level, Groundwork USA and River Network co-lead UWLN, sharing roles in program design, facilitation, funding, and communications. At the individual level, every team member is trusted to shape the work, take initiative, and make decisions regardless of their title. No one person or organization holds the vision alone – we carry it together.

Forming a shared leadership system that works for us took time. We spent years learning, adjusting, and building trust to have the foundation necessary for a strong partnership. Through that process, we developed seven pillars of shared leadership, which we return to when we feel stuck in our work. These seven pillars help us stay aligned in our mission, and shape the reasoning, process, and product of the work we do every single day.

Three Lessons from our Shared Leadership Journey

While we have no doubts that shared leadership was the right model for this program, it has not always been a smooth, easy road. If you’re considering how you may want to rethink your current structure or wondering why you can’t find your groove in your current model, here are our three biggest pieces of advice:

Utilize the built-in flexibility and adaptability to the fullest

One of the clearest strengths of shared leadership is how it creates built-in flexibility. Because every member of our team has the same access to shared tools, documents, and decision-making systems, we’re able to support one another easily when someone has to step away. Whether it’s caused by parental leave, health emergencies, severe weather events, or unexpected funding shifts, we have a successful system for stepping in when someone steps out. This support is a natural byproduct when individuals have a sense of personal investment in the work. When everyone understands the big picture and has what they need to lead, it becomes easier to adapt.

Listen first, then lead

Our shared purpose is shaped by the needs and perspectives of the people we support. In our eyes, they have a seat at the decision-making table too. Our shared purpose starts, and is periodically adjusted, by hearing what our network members are up to, what they need, and where they feel stuck. By making space to discuss their needs, reflections, and feedback they have for us, we’ve been able to stay rooted in the on-the-ground needs of the people we serve. We carry these insights into our internal strategy, discussing priorities amongst ourselves and conversations with funders. This practice has helped us stay true to our mission and avoid – or at least limit – mission drift brought on by other external pressures.

Recognize when you’re working in systems that aren’t designed for this model

Shared leadership isn’t always easy, especially when it comes to money and formal authority. Although we work within a shared leadership system, we exist in a world of hierarchical structures and expectations, so it’s important to understand how to share financial decision-making in a system that isn’t really built for it.

We’ve felt this most clearly in how we manage grant funding, especially federal grants that require a single “prime awardee” to make financial decisions on behalf of all partners. This structure doesn’t reflect how we actually work together, so we’ve had to develop ways to co-create budgets that align with our organizational priorities, clarify shared and separate costs, and understand thoroughly how to navigate funding requirements. It takes a lot of trust and open communication to navigate this dynamic and ensure that all partners feel confident, but we are stronger for it. Over the past decade, we’ve successfully managed to switch the project leads twice, each time because it was the most sustainable move for the program. That willingness to center UWLN needs over “prime awardee” status is what trusting shared leadership looks like in practice.

Looking forward: Read more in our report!

Leadership looks different in every organization, project, and community. But one thing we’ve found to be true time and time again is that when leadership is shared by the whole team, people thrive – and so does the work!

We hope that our shared reflections and framework have been a helpful launching point for you to consider shared leadership in your work. If you want to dive deeper into the framework and better understand how each pillar is put into practice, check out our UWLN Shared Leadership Report here: