Dillon Tabish
Communication and Education Program Manager – Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, Kalispell • Fundamentals Cohort 3
WCLDP Program
Experiential
Learning
The WCLDP experience impacts people in a multitude of ways — but what sets it apart is its deeply participatory design. This isn’t passive learning. It’s practice.
“The best part of the class was it was participatory and was not a typical ‘PowerPoint’ lecture on leadership. It was not passive! This program threw participants into practice, which was hard for me but very impactful.”
– Dillon Tabish
Team Challenge
Tackling the West’s Most Intractable Conservation Problems
A significant portion of the WCLDP experience centers on engagement in a team challenge. Cohort participants self-organize around complex, contested, and deeply human conservation issues — the ones that defy easy answers.
“Conservation in the west is a complex, conflict-ridden subject, and we’re not going to make progress by focusing on the traditional wildlife science mindset; most of the issues are more increasingly rooted in social science and people dynamics.”
This shared struggle among cohort participants creates an incredible bond and community — rapidly and authentically. Fellows don’t just study leadership; they practice it together on problems that matter.
Fellows in Action
Congressional App Challenge Winners
One cohort team focused on building conservation engagement across different and often marginalized communities. They continued meeting beyond graduation and developed an app to promote opportunities for youth to spend time in nature — an effort that earned national recognition.
Emma Anderson & Makayla Davenport
Fellow Voices
Reshaping Agency Culture and Staff
“These tools will reshape agency culture and staff. WCLDP offers not only the concepts but more importantly the time and space to practice and experiment with colleagues. The course creates a community through which to explore new ideas and ways of thinking and thus grows our own capacity for our agencies and the broader conservation community.”
“WCLDP opened my eyes to the idea that leadership is a life-long practice for the benefit of myself and my agency.”
Why It Matters
Skills for the
Change We Need
01
Comfort with Uncertainty
Fellows develop an increased ability to diagnose complex challenges and lead through ambiguity — without defaulting to false certainty.
02
Surfacing Loss
Addressing the loss felt by nearly everyone in difficult situations — a critical and often overlooked dimension of lasting change.
03
Adaptive Response
Slowing down to recognize the space between a stimulus and a response — and choosing what to do with that space.
04
Organizational Impact
Fellows leave with an outsized capacity to affect organizational change — returning to their agencies and collaboratives as more capable, adaptive leaders.
In today’s culture of impatience, desire for certainty, and demand for immediate answers, these skills are foundational to creating the kind of change we all desire in conservation.