1. Exercise 4.8 15 min. Knowing the Community
Objectives: Identify what you already know and what you need to know about your community. State how to find the info you need in order to understand your audience.
Reference Fact Sheet 4.5 and Worksheet 1
Think about the audiences you work with and answer the questions- 8 min.
Resource professionals who have lived in a community for a long time will know a great deal about
the residents and have an intuitive sense of how to approach them. If the community is in transition,
however, resource professionals may not have a good sense of who the newcomers are. If the
resource professional is new to the region, this exercise will help him or her think about who the
audience is.
Explain that a good presentation is a careful balancing act between understanding what the
audience already knows and addressing what the presenter wants to say in a way the audience
wants to hear it. At a very broad level, we can imagine a lot about what the audience cares
about by virtue of who they are. Most residents care about environmental quality and children’s
safety. Most developers want to build quality but economically feasible developments.
Most community decision makers must balance a variety of conflicting perspectives while
serving the majority. But within each group there are also differences. One resident may not
have children, and another may have just moved into the neighborhood last week. These two
demographic facts—presence of children and years in the community—mean these audience
members will have different information and care about different things

2. Discussion Knowing the Community
Do you know enough to know what people in this community care about?
What things are important to them?
What information about the community are you most comfortable with?
What are you least sure of?
How could you discover more about this community?
This exercise gives your participants a chance to share what they know about their interface audiences
and how they came to those realizations. This could be particularly important for newcomers
to your agency as they begin to learn from those who have been around. At the same time, the interface
audience of tomorrow is not what it was yesterday. It is important for all resource professionals
to pay attention to their audiences, to seek information, and to check assumptions.
For

3. Discussion Working with Conflict
Answer the following questions:
What are the positions of the parties involved?
What are the interests of the parties involved?
What could everyone agree on?
What strategies could a natural resource professional use to assist in the resolution of this conflict?
Conflict resolution can be a difficult process, but conflict prevention may be more achievable.
Partnerships with other agencies, town councils, citizen groups, and businesses can help build relationships that may help people resolve misunderstandings before they escalate to conflict situations.
Encourage participants to discuss examples they know of such partnerships and the strategies
others have used to reduce or resolve conflicts.

4. Exercise 4.9 45 min. Working with Conflict
Objective: Explore the interests that underlie conflicts and suggest strategies to move parties toward common ground.
Reference Fact Sheet 4.9
Form groups of 6-7 people.
Choose a scenario from the Handout: Scenario Cards
Discuss your scenario. Use your imagination and experience to fill in detail blanks.
This exercise gives your participants a chance to demonstrate strategies they could use to reduce or
resolve a conflict.
conflict in the wildland-urban interface is
inevitable. Investments are significant, perspectives are varied, and some people have the
skills and time to make their views known. What is the natural resource agency’s role in such
conflicts? In some cases, resource professionals can sit on neutral middle ground, providing
information to all parties. In other cases, however, agency staff are in the middle of conflict,
legally bound to represent a position that others do not agree with.