BlueTerra Partners Joins the Partnership and Community Collaboration Academy as Guest and Co-Instructor

March 12, 2026
By Joe Smith, Founder and Principal Consultant

There's a phrase that's become a staple in the partnership and collaboration profession: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

I've been thinking about it differently. If you want to go far, go together. If you want to go fast, build trust. With both, the impossible becomes possible.

That idea — that trust is the accelerant, not the obstacle — shaped what I had the privilege of teaching this winter. Over two program weeks in February and March 2026, I served as a guest and co-instructor in the Partnership and Collaboration Academy's Managing by Network (MbN) program, teaching across multiple cohorts of mid-career and senior professionals navigating complex multi-stakeholder environments.

What I Taught

The sessions explored a question that practitioners in this space face every day: how do you lead — and keep partners genuinely engaged — when no single entity has authority over the whole system?

We started with the foundation. Collaborative leadership isn't about having the answers — it's about creating the conditions for groups to do together what none can do alone. That means trust is infrastructure, not a “nice to have.” It means shared goals don't erase real differences in incentives, timelines, and risk tolerance — and the leader's job is to help people work across those boundaries. It means designing the process: structuring conversations, setting norms for how decisions get made, and creating space for honest disagreement rather than polite agreement.

From there, we moved into the mechanics of partner engagement — the motivations that drive partners to show up and stay involved, the difference between strategic, tactical, and operational engagement, and the often-overlooked role that recognition plays in sustaining long-term partnerships. We examined how to build and maintain corporate and foundation partnerships, how partners can tell stories in impactful ways that supplement agency storytelling, and how to align differing motivations while achieving shared outcomes.

I brought these ideas to life through real-world examples from my own career: a Coca-Cola watershed partnership that grew from $250K to $5M, a $500M wildfire crisis coordination effort, PBS storytelling partnerships with gateway communities, and national partnership systems I helped design and manage at the U.S. Forest Service. The emphasis throughout was on practical application — not theory — helping participants better understand, diagnose, and strengthen the partnerships they're already managing.

How We Taught

The format was intentionally conversational. These weren't lectures. Participants brought their own partnership challenges into the room and worked through them in real time, using frameworks grounded in practice. Interactive techniques like waterfall chats and reflection exercises kept the energy high and the dialogue moving across multiple virtual cohorts. Peer learning and facilitated dialogue reinforced the core idea: the best thinking in a partnership comes from the room, not the front of the room.

Why It Matters

Public agencies and organizations increasingly operate in complex networks, not hierarchies. The hardest problems — climate, wildfire, community resilience — cannot be solved by one organization alone. Collaborative leadership isn't a soft skill. It's a strategic capability. The organizations and agencies that do it well don't just convene partners — they create the conditions for partners to move forward together with purpose. That requires more than good intentions. It requires systems, trust, and leaders who know how to build both. Collaborative leadership invites people into the room. Trust empowers them to move forward with purpose.

About Managing by Network

The Partnership and Community Collaboration Academy's Managing by Network program is an executive education experience directed by Anne Desmarais for professionals leading cross-boundary work in government, nonprofit, and private-sector contexts. The program runs in cohort-based sessions over multiple months, combining instruction with applied practice. Learn more at partnership-academy.net.

BlueTerra Partners provides guest instruction, workshops, and cohort-based training for organizations and programs building collaborative leadership capacity. Learn more about our Training and Capacity Development services.