Boreas Students Hone Leadership Skills
BY BARRETT COLOMBO
Registration for the Boreas Leadership Program’s spring workshops is open now. The workshops and networking events this spring offer practical opportunities to join a growing community of graduate and professional students engaged in issues of sustainability.
In addition to strong disciplinary training through a formal degree program, meeting the world’s most urgent challenges of sustainability demands leadership skills that aren’t always easy to develop in graduate school. Whether in the private sector or public service, working in an NGO or academia, progress on sustainability issues requires us to hone our communication and leadership skills, as well as our capacities for systems thinking. Sponsored by the Institute on the Environment, the new Boreas program offers training in these skills. Within a university whose scale and scope can make it difficult to collaborate across colleges and disciplines, Boreas offers an opportunity to build a trans-disciplinary community of scholars and actors focused on the most urgent issues of sustainability.
A few key things about Boreas that go against business as usual at the University:
Boreas is open to all: Learn from a diverse group of colleagues. There are already ten colleges represented from across the University.
Boreas workshops are non-credit: Workshops don’t demand an outsized slice of your schedule. Boreas offers short courses and workshops in communications and media, integrative leadership, and systems thinking and tools.
Networking events: Enjoy good food and drink while talking with prominent environmental leaders about how they got going in their career. Past guests have included the executive director of the Will Steger Foundation, the sustainability manager for Gold’n Plump, the current Minnesota state auditor, and the author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. You don’t have to be registered in a workshop to attend an event.
Earn the Boreas Certificate: Starting this spring, Boreas participants will be able to complete a Boreas certificate. Learn more about the certificate requirements and how to pursue them.
