Leap of Leadership
Community meet-ups with Spring Co-CEO Archana Deshpande
July 22—“Wild strategy”: Practical leadership lessons from nature
with Erin Blanding
1 PM UTC | 9 AM Toronto | 4 PM Nairobi | 8 PM Jakarta (Find your time zone)
Nature is our oldest teacher. If you listen, we're being called to slow down enough to notice how nature’s regenerative systems work—and apply this in our own leadership.
Join July’s Leap of Leadership session with Spring’s Leadership Fellow, Erin Blanding to explore what it means to lead as part of a living system. Drawing on ecological cycles, Erin will support us to kindle our relationships with place, which can deepen our ability to play a transformative role within the communities, movements and ecosystems we serve.
So many of us spend our days disconnected from the very systems that can help us make sense of complexity, change, and uncertainty.
When we notice what landscapes and water systems are doing, we are practicing relationality. We’re learning to spot opportunities we can influence. We’re understanding what rhythms actually sustain life.
How could “wild” wisdom from nature’s adaptive processes of emergence, growth, loss, and renewal support your team to solve complex problems? Where might you be over-controlling or under-tending systems in your life?
Erin is a facilitator, leadership coach and organizational change strategist whose work is rooted in land-connected approaches to community care. She’ll guide us through small practices to support noticing and reconnecting with nature, which can help us lead with greater wisdom, steadiness, and alignment in a time of profound change. With examples, we’ll explore how, over time, small, targeted changes can alter the flow of entire ecosystems and the course of the future.
🌿 You're invited (but not required!) to connect from your usual desk or a place where you feel connected to nature—whether that’s simply bringing a photograph or keepsake from nature to your usual workspace, taking your laptop out to your yard or balcony, or connecting on your mobile phone from somewhere further afield. We’re designing this session to be a one where you can give yourself space to think a little differently.
Meet Erin
Erin Blanding is a facilitator, leadership coach, and organizational change strategist whose work is rooted in trauma-aware, anti-oppressive, and land-connected approaches to leadership and community care. She has spent the last 23 years in grassroots organizing, nonprofit leadership, and global social justice and nature-based initiatives.
She is a founder, creator and collaborator on several initiatives restoring habitats, building regenerative economies and offering nature-based learning for youth, including Future Generations University and Borderlands Restoration Leadership Initiative. She currently leads the Canada-based MakeWay foundation, which builds partnerships and solutions to help nature and communities thrive together.
Erin is known for her creativity, resourcefulness, and a generative, build-from-what’s-here approach. You can find her learning from watersheds, digging and singing in her garden, hosting canning parties for friends and much more!
Archana Deshpande
Archana Deshpande is the host of Leap of Leadership, Spring Co-CEO and a multilingual, creative rights advocate, strategist, facilitator and Integral Master Coach™. She believes major strides towards justice, life-giving societal change and liberation are possible through the cultivation of generosity, presence, strong communities along with intentional actions.
Previously, Archana led the creation and expansion of OpenGlobalRights — a multilingual, global forum that explores human rights policies and strategies as well as managed and conducted research on human rights organizations and public perceptions of human rights in India, Mexico, and Morocco. She has co-authored various publications on the resource mobilization challenges and opportunities for human rights groups in the Global South and is passionate about finding innovative ways to sustain and expand social and climate justice initiatives.
Archana holds a master's degree in International Affairs and is an accredited Integral Master Coach™. She is based in Toronto, Canada, and speaks English, Spanish, French, and Gujarat. She gets her creative juices flowing through dancing with her daughter, painting, and singing.
Learn more about her on our About Us page!
