Facilitating Multi-Party Negotiations and Collaboration

Ekow Edzie is a bilingual (Spanish and English) collaborative process professional with ten years of experience in stakeholder engagement, facilitation and workshop design across a diverse set of natural resource governance issues, both domestic and international.

Ekow designs stakeholder engagement strategies and facilitates environmental planning and public policy disputes. His primary practice areas include water resources management, international development, landscape-level forest management and economic and social policy. 

While working at the Consensus Building Institute, Ekow facilitated and mediated projects on sustainable groundwater management, forestry, sustainable agriculture, public health and social and economic policy.

Project Examples Include:

• Supporting Disadvantaged Community (DAC) Engagement on Sustainable Groundwater Planning in Salinas, CA -Link to DAC Community Engagement Strategy

• Facilitating a community health worker driven work group with grass-roots community associations to advance covid-19 response across Monterey County, CA

• Conducting interviews with dairy workers and developing recommendations to support Fair Trade USA’s work adapting their global Agricultural Performance Standard to the US domestic dairy context (this project was covered by Forbes here)

• In support of Groundwater Sustainability Planning in Fox Canyon (Ventura County, CA), facilitated a weekly projects committee meeting to advance water-project planning efforts to augment the sustainable yield of the basin. -Link to Stakeholder Assessment (co-author)

• Developed public engagement strategy for a contentious restoration project on Lake Tahoe - Link to Public Engagement Strategy

• Served as project manager for the organization of a series of public dialogues to provide opportunity for broad public engagement on the U.S. Forest Service’s Northwest Forest Planning efforts.

• Co-facilitated a series of workshops on effective multi-party negotiations for a Colombian human rights organization.

• Designed guidelines for effective public engagement for the Health Effects Institute ahead of a nation-wide research initiative on the effects of domestic oil and gas development.

Prior to working with CBI, Ekow facilitated workshops and trainings to support the international operations of EF Education First, with non-profits and community association partner organizations across the Dominican Republic, Peru and Ecuador. Ekow also facilitated numerous workshops and trainings while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic.

Ecotourism & the Women's association of the Jimenoa Waterfall

My assignment with the U.S. Peace Corps was to cultivate the development of an ecotourism project based out of a national park in the central mountains of the Dominican Republic. I had the privilege of working alongside a group of women who believed in the potential of ecotourism as a meaningful source of economic development in the region.  In the hopes of supporting these women's efforts at building strong and resilient collaborative partnerships with the Dominican Ministry of Environment and local tourism businesses, I designed and facilitated a month long ecotourism, customer service & business fundamentals workshop. 

Managing challenges and setting expectations in the sacred VAlley

EF Education First's operation in Peru hinges upon partnerships with five local non-profits based in the outskirts of Cusco, the Sacred Valley and Puno. These organizations receive EF student travelers and teach them about their distinct approaches to community development. One of my responsibilities as a manager for EF's product innovation team was to cultivate effective collaboration between EF and these Peruvian non-profits. In the fall of 2015 I designed and facilitated a workshop to promote effective co-management of the intricate and delicate aspects of this collaborative operation, with a focus on safety management, logistics and program cohesion

Aligning vision & Mission in Santo Domingo

From September of 2013 to September of 2015 I worked as an independent contractor for EF based in the Dominican Republic. My central tasks in this role included: finding local organizations that could receive EF students, designing educational programming and creating systems and procedures to manage cross-border collaboration. After establishing EF's operation in the DR, I organized annual workshops designed to help EF staff and the staff of EF's partner organizations align on mission and vision.