Overview

Water Leaders Institute brings people together to engage in dialogue, learning, and co-creation. Diverse perspectives, hand-on activities, and field trips make for rich experiences that inspire leadership and action.

Cohorts typically have 15 to 20 members. Cohorts consist of representatives from different sectors and stakeholder groups, ranging from neighborhood leaders and policy makers to artists/culture bearers and business leaders. 

Cohorts meet over four to six weeks, with 10-15 hours of learning modules, discussions, field trips, and preparation for community projects.

Co-Create
Curriculum

We co-create by sharing knowledge and developing curriculum. Representatives of each cohort join WLI as Co-Creators, bringing unique ways of understanding the landscape, water, infrastructure, risk, and resilience to the table. Co-creation ensures that curriculum, resources, and methodologies are aligned with the capacities, needs, and interests of each cohort.

Explore
Narratives

We explore narratives through story circles and shared frameworks. Cohort members share their relationship to water and their experiences of flooding, subsidence, vulnerability, and resilience. We connect individual experiences and insights to broader understanding of the systems, policies, and processes that shape our collective relationship to water.

Build
Skills

We build skills through field trips, drawing, and research. Learning is grounded in everyday experiences and observable phenomena. We explore how water flows through the city, and the ways in which individuals, institutions, and public agencies shape that flow of water. Water Leaders come away with new and sharpened skills to use in their own resilience, advocacy, and leadership efforts.

Community
Impact

Foster
Leadership

We foster leadership in creating equitable policies, programs, and solutions in the delta context. WLI supports diverse stakeholders in gaining the knowledge, skills, and capacity to work together on defining “living with water” for New Orleans. We explore how the city has changed over the centuries, examine policies and programs that govern risk and resilience, and define solutions based on community values.

We initiate community impact through skill shares, making connections, and community projects. Water Leaders are expected to bring WLI knowledge and methodologies back to their communities, in order to expand the impact of each cohort. This takes the form of skill share workshops, connecting WLI themes to other issue areas, and funding for community projects designed and led by cohort members.