National Park Service Visitor and Resource Protection Staff Focuses on Week of Leadership

NPS participants in the 2019 Women and Leadership Symposium came from all across the country from both law enforcement and fire and aviation.

"A lesson I learned from the NPS symposium is the concept of leading upwards. Through personal stories and experiences, I realize you can make positive change as a leader without being in a supervisory role. I learned techniques for how I can do this within my work group but also within my park and community. It was refreshing to see how women are doing this in their home units and has inspired me to do the same."

Staff from all levels of the National Park Service in law enforcement, United States Park Police, as well as fire and aviation spent a week learning leadership lessons from one another as well as from a diverse group of leaders during the last week of September 2019.

The NPS National Ranger Council (NRC) took the lead in coordinating a symposium for the men and women who had applied for the opportunity to attend in Boise, Idaho. In addition to a day focused specifically on the NPS, the attendees went to the Andrus Center Women & Leadership Conference, as well as a post-conference interagency meeting attended by staff from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Forest Service.

NPS Fire and Aviation has hosted scholarship recipients to attend the Women and Leadership Conference in Boise, Idaho since 2015. Each year, feedback from the participants show that the opportunity and experience has been invaluable to their leadership journey and meeting others on that same journey provides a support network; 2019 was no different. In addition to learning to lead upwards, other participants met colleagues who had similar challenges and heard some solutions.

The opportunity to mentor women who were just starting out was another big topic of discussion. One participant put it well. “There were several key lessons learned from the symposium, but one of the themes that resonated with me was the idea that if women can see it, they can be it. Mentoring plays a crucial role in recruitment and retention which is so greatly needed at this point. In small group sharing I realized how fortunate I was to have such amazing women mentors throughout my career. It gave me a different perspective than so many of my colleagues that I was fortunate to meet.”

NPS Fire and Aviation will take the lead for the 2020 Women and Leadership Symposium in Boise to be held the week of September 14.