Leadership Institute helps shape enlightened, progressive public policy

An innovative policy institute is quietly training dozens of
Sonoma County’s political leaders, and potential leaders, to create
public policy with a progressive perspective.
The goal of the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy
is to educate public leaders to create public policy that is
socially just, environmentally friendly and leads to a healthy
economy and sustainable community. (Sustainability is generally
defined as environmentally friendly, economically viable and
socially equitable.)
For the past three years, the Leadership Institute has held
leadership training for community activists, public officials and
other leaders. The nine-month course includes training in land use
and water issues, economics, sustainability, growth, county history
and demographics, government and activism, to name a few.
Recently, the institute hired a new president, Windsor resident
Ron Sundergill, and started its fourth leadership training class.
Sundergill, who has held various public policy roles in Washington,
D.C., finds Sonoma County’s political climate to his liking. “The
political environment in Sonoma County is fertile ground for this
kind of institute and these kinds of policies,” said Sundergill.
“The general population is very open to the idea of sustainability,
… and public officials, are too.”
The class of 2003-04 includes Sebastopol City Councilmember
Linda Kelley and Sebastopol Planning Commissioners Claire Najarian
and Yvette Williams van Aggelen.
Past classes have included leaders from all parts of the county,
including labor leaders, community activists and teachers.
Loosely modeled after “Leadership Santa Rosa,” which is
organized by that city’s Chamber of Commerce and has a decidedly
business-friendly bent, the Leadership Institute’s version aims to
link the environment with the economy and create public policy that
includes ecology, economics and social justice.
The institute was founded by Rick Theis, a Sebastopol resident,
a former Santa Rosa Planning Commission-er, city council candidate
and the former director of the Sonoma County Grape Growers
Association. Theis went through the Leadership Santa Rosa course in
the 1980s and afterward remembers speaking about it with Dick Day
and Bill Kortum, two elders of the county’s environmental
movement.
“They said ‘Why isn’t there anything like this for
environmentalists?’ That stuck in my mind,” said Theis.
Several years later, Theis and his wife, Carolyn Johnson,
started asking themselves, “How can we do this? How can we make
this happen? Then we said, ‘We can do this, we can make this
happen.'”
So Theis cashed in his Coca Cola stock (which he bought during
his brief employment with the soda pop giant) and founded the
institute. Theis said the model for the institute came not only
from Leadership Santa Rosa but in part from the Environmental Forum
of Marin. “But we wanted to be more than that,” he said. “We wanted
to bring in social equity, which leads to a focus on creating
public policy for sustainable futures.”
Theis has seen direct results. Two graduates of a past class
were members of the Cloverdale Planning Commission. Their
involvement, he believes, led to the city approving “the most
progressive inclusionary housing element in Sonoma County.”
Inclusionary housing requires developers to include a percentage of
affordable housing units in all residential projects.
“It makes a difference,” he said.
New president Ron Sundergill brings an extensive background in
public policy development at the local and national levels to the
institute. He was the Washington Representative for Energy at the
Union of Concerned Scientists, director of Legislation at the
Maryland Department of Human Resources, president of the Board of
County Commissioners in Frederick County, Maryland, and he held
posts with the Sierra Club and the U.S. Catholic Conference.
“He’s fabulous,” said Theis. “When I met him I said, ‘we have to
get this guy on board.'”
Sundergill came aboard in July and has been rapidly acquainting
himself with local elected leaders and the critical issues facing
Sonoma County. He has a goal of meeting every elected official in
the county by the end of the year. His job is to run leadership
training, educate the county’s elected and appointed officials, and
raise funds for the non-profit organization.
“The experience I have in government is very important for an
organization like this,” said Sundergill, during an interview in
the Leadership Institute’s office in Santa Rosa. “We’re interested
in training leaders, and potential leaders, and helping them
understand and implement public policy that takes into account
sustainability, economics, the environment, as well as social
equality.”
During the leadership training, a variety of speakers are
brought in from various agencies and organizations. “When you go
through the class you get to know who the different people are in
the water agency or the board of public utilities,” said Una Glass,
a graduate of the 2002-03 training class. “You learn who makes the
policies and who are the people you need to contact or where you
have to go to a meeting to fix the problems.”
Glass, a Sebastopol resident who works as an aide to county
Supervisor Mike Reilly, said the leadership class was a worthwhile
exercise. “I thought it was a great class. One of the really great
things I got out of it was there was tons of information. The other
thing was the networking. Talking to and being with a group of
people that are involved in the public process … It was great to
hear all those different perspectives. It was this kind of
interactive forum to talk with people who could bring a lot of
information to the mix.”
Sundergill, who is part of this year’s leadership training,
believes the process has been effective. “The people who go through
the program are much more effective and knowledgeable about the
issues,” he said. “They go back to the organization they are
already involved in and they are more effective because they have a
broad-brush background in a lot of these important issues.”
More information about the Leadership Institute for Ecology
& the Economy is available at www.ecoleader.org.