This year, after twelve years of work, the Vital Lands Illinois network made a decision I’m both proud of and still a little wistful about: we sunset the network. Not because the work of conservation in Illinois is finished (it never is), but because the network had done what it set out to do, and we wanted to close it well rather than let it fade. Mission accomplished, and room made for what comes next. As we wind down, I wanted to take a moment to look back at what this network became and what it taught me.

In 2008, the Grand Victoria Foundation asked me to help launch something Illinois didn’t have: a statewide network connecting the people doing conservation work across the state, land trusts, agencies, universities, grassroots groups, funders, so they could learn from each other instead of working in isolation. Conservation in Illinois was, at the time, a fragmented landscape of good people doing good work without much connective tissue between them. The foundation’s instinct was that a network, not another organization, was the right response. I’ve spent a long time since then grateful they trusted that instinct, and grateful they trusted me to help build it.

I took on the role of Network Engagement Facilitator, and for the next twelve years, in close partnership with the Institute for Conservation Leadership (ICL), that’s what I did: facilitate engagement. Convene. Design gatherings where the right conversations could happen. Help a rotating group of volunteer leaders, we called them Network Architects, steer something that belonged to everyone and no one in particular. Their organizations received a modest annual stipend to cover the time they gave; the work itself they gave freely, year after year, because they believed in it.

I owe a particular debt to Dianne Russell, ICL’s Executive Director, who led this collaboration from the very start. Dianne taught me more about multi-stakeholder collaboration than any book or training ever could, and she brought me in as a true co-creator of the network rather than an outside contractor: shaping its design together, and trusting me to bring my own engagement tools and methodologies into everything we built. So much of what worked in Vital Lands Illinois worked because Dianne and ICL were willing to build it with me rather than hand me a blueprint.

Early on, we built tools to help a loose, voluntary network actually function like one: a system map that helped people see where they sat in the larger landscape of Illinois conservation, structured exercises that helped strangers become collaborators over the course of a single Summit, and a rhythm of gathering that kept the connections alive between those big annual moments. Over time, that rhythm became a layered way of staying connected across the year:

• An Annual Summit drawing 150 or more people from across the state for deep, structured collaboration
• Vital Sessions and Regional Gatherings that kept smaller, more local conversations going between Summits
• Small Grants that seeded new collaborations members couldn’t have funded alone
• Shared organizing and advocacy on issues too big for any one organization
• Professional development that helped people grow as practitioners and as network leaders

What I’ve loved most about watching this network evolve is how much braver its conversations became. In the early years, we were mostly helping people find each other. By the later years, we were hosting honest, sometimes difficult conversations, about whiteness in conservation, about tribal partnerships and land repatriation, about what it actually takes to make this field reflect the state it serves. That shift, from networking to genuinely reckoning with hard questions together, is not something you can engineer on a timeline. It happens because people build enough trust to risk it. Watching that trust get built, Summit by Summit, is the part of this work I’m proudest to have helped hold space for.

The network grew from roughly 100 members to over 240, but the numbers were never really the point. The point was the culture shift. I heard it from members again and again over the years: conversations across organizations became more sophisticated, more generous, less territorial. People stopped seeing each other as competitors for the same small pool of funding and started seeing each other as collaborators in the same shared work. Projects were born out of that shift that wouldn’t have existed otherwise, cross-regional restoration partnerships, shared advocacy campaigns, new collaborations between land trusts and universities and grassroots groups. Illinois became, as far as we could tell, home to the only network of its kind in the country working at this scale across the full conservation sector. That’s not a small thing.

Twelve years is a long time to sit with one piece of work, and it changed how I think about collaboration itself. I learned that networks don’t run on structure alone, they run on trust, and trust has to be tended deliberately, gathering by gathering, year by year. I learned that the facilitator’s job is mostly to get out of the way at the right moments and hold the container at the others. And I learned that knowing when something is finished, really finished, is its own kind of discipline. It would have been easy to keep the network running on inertia. It took more courage, and more honesty, to recognize that it had done its job and to let it close with dignity instead.

None of this happens without the Grand Victoria Foundation, who had the vision to fund a network instead of another program, and the patience to let it take the years it needed to become what it became. And none of it happens without Nancy Fishman, the foundation’s Executive Director, who was the unwavering champion of this effort from the very beginning. Nancy believed in this work long before it had proven itself, and she kept believing in it through every hard stretch along the way. I am deeply grateful to her and to the whole Grand Victoria Foundation team for the trust they placed in this work, and in me.

I’m equally grateful to the Institute for Conservation Leadership and to Dianne Russell, whose partnership and mentorship shaped this network from day one and shaped me as a practitioner along the way.

To every Network Architect, every Summit participant, every organization that showed up year after year: thank you. You built this together, and what you built changed how conservation gets done in Illinois.

I’ve put together a full case study of Vital Lands Illinois, the challenges, the process, the outcomes, and the impact, which you can read here. If you’re working on cross-sector collaboration in your own field, I hope there’s something in this story that’s useful to you. There certainly was for me.