Making Space: Restoring Cranberry Bogs for Marsh Migration
Strategic Learning
Revised: 1/30/2026
This page tracks learning priorities for the project. These priorities reflect the major hurdles to remaining grant milestones. For each priority below you will find the motivating challenge, the guiding question, insights that we've tagged that have direct relevance, and related tags used by the community are relevant to the priority.
The learning priorities on this page were selected as part of a strategic learning planning process that we undertook in Fall 2025. The document linked below contains the learning plan, which includes details on how each priority will be pursued. These priorities are fixed in that they reflect the key challenges to the projects remaining milestones. However, our approach to each priority may evolve as we are faced with reality of implementation. When this occurs, the plan document ppt file will be revised and uploaded, and this page will be updated accordingly.
Challenge: We can’t progress with site assessment & concept design until we have a set of interested landowners
Question:
How might we outreach to and cultivate relationships with growers of sites to spark their engagement and support them in evaluating their fit and readiness for Making Space conceptual design development, so that enough are ultimately ready to enroll in a partnership?
Insights on `priority sites`: https://projects.livingobservatory.org/insights?t=making-space&tag=priority%20sites
Related Tags:
Notes:
Challenge: There are many parties involved, cultural respect easements pose different benefits and risks to each group. Dialog could stall if we are not careful.
Question:
How might we cultivate mutual trust and communication among the many parties to potential cultural respect easements (CRE) on pilot sites, foster shared understanding of the land’s cultural significance and broad interest in exploring feasibility?
Insights on `cultural respect`: https://projects.livingobservatory.org/insights?t=making-space&tag=cultural%20respect
Related Tags:
Notes:
Challenge: On paper, there is a perceived technical gap between qualifications of growers and experienced wetland restoration contractors. In practice growers have an abundance of translatable skills, both in terms of on the groundwork and project management. Contracts have specific qualifications that might disqualify growers, who would otherwise excel. How do we get through the red tape, what training really is needed?
Question:
What will it take to assess the initial readiness of growers who have expressed an interest in construction contracting?
Insights on `grower guild`: https://projects.livingobservatory.org/insights?t=making-space&tag=grower%20guild
Related Tags: `construction`
Notes: Insights on `construction` can inform training materials for growers who seek to contract on restoration sites.
Challenge: Our project Gantt chart captures tasks – we have systems in place for data management and sharing; and we identified learning priorities – but how will partners connect, share, and carry shared lessons into our scaling memo and future work?
Question:
How might we facilitate cross-partner conversations to develop a shared sense of what we are learning from Making Space work, on issues relevant to scaling?
Insights on `learning culture`: https://projects.livingobservatory.org/insights?t=making-space&tag=learning%20culture
Related Tags: `learning` `insights`
Notes:
In Fall of 2025, Andrea Jarebek, Adrian Wiegman worked with Keri-Nicole Dillman to identify learning priorities to pursue as part of a strategic learning plan. Keri-Nicole is an expert in organizational learning, and trained us in methods for strategic learning. After some orientation to the process, we started developing a "theory-of-change" for the making space project based on the written grant language and our experience on the project to date. Then we started identifying mission-critical, future facing questions.
We identified about 20 questions, we worked with Keri-Nicole to narrow down the pool to those and challenging and complex enough to be worth investigating, but could be feasibly answered within project constraints (e.g. within scope of the project and before the end of the project). We also considered overlapping questions or ones that were linked in a sequence, we either chose the one with the most appropriate scope and sometimes we reworded the questions.
A good strategic learning question is open, often with conditions/qualifiers:
- Starts with: "What would it take…” or “How might we”
- Qualified with: “... such that…" xx conditions are met
Once narrowed down a manageable set of candidates (4 - 6 priorities), we then paused for review and reflection, we looked back at the project and an assessed work to date. We asked our selves, do the learning priorities sufficiently cover the remaining gaps in the project? Ultimately this round of reflection enabled use to identify one new priority around building a dialog to establish cultural respect easements below (see `Cultural Respect`).
Ultimately the four priorities that we adopted reflect the biggest potential hurdles for the completion of the remaining major grant objectives. These priorities are related in that they all deal with human elements that are outside of any one persons control.
Once learning priorities were identified, we then formalized the language of the questions and goals, and developed a learning plan. This involved formulating a hunch (or hypothesis, “if this, then that”), identifying information needs and sources, and processes for reflection and action. Goals were bounded by a completed a timeline. We iterated on this over a period of weeks until the plan was ready to be drafted and shared.
The scientists reading this may notice some crossover to planning a research project. In fact, most people subconsiously apply this approach to their everyday problems. However, strategic learning is a concious effort, and in contrast to scientific study the aim is actionable and timely information. The level of rigor needed to make a decision can be adjusted on the risks involved in the priority and how quickly action is needed. This strategic learning process is a compromise between the unstructured learning and decision making that we perform everyday, and rigid scientific method. Helping to target our efforts to obtain information in time to take action.
To advance our learning goals, our team is engaging regularly with partners. We are building a culture of learning and training amongst our partner network. Prior to our meetings and events, we assess progress on the learning priorities and identify needs. During meetings, we actively pursue these priorities, make space for reflection, and hone our instincts for insight. Within meetings, a learning facilitator can be assigned to help partners recognize, articulate, and document their insights. After action, we review the ahah moments and work with partners to document them as insights.
The insight capture tool is one of the primary tools we use to track learning. Insights function similarly to social media or blog posts, including a title, content, authors, tags, and comments. See the insights documentation for details on insight features. The insights capture tool gives us the capability sort and cluster insights and relate them to the learning priorities in a number of ways.
Here is how we are using this tool to track progress on our strategic learning priorities:
- Each learning priority has its own insight post and/or project sub-page.
- Each priority is coded as follows using tags:
- `[unique name tag]`: a short unique memorable name for the priority, e.g. `grower guild`
- `learning priority`: is a general tag that supports cross-project learning.
- Users can assign freeform tags when posting new insights.
- We will track freeform tags that are particularly relevant to a certain priority. e.g. posts tagged with `construction` inform our work on the `grower guild`.
- We periodically review insights. During review, we can comment, edit, and assign new tags that link insights to the learning priority. For example:
- An insight about the technical aspects of construction on a restoration site might be relevant to a grower planning construction on their farm.
- We can label this insight with the `construction` and `grower guild`. The former relates the post to the broader community, while the latter informs the partners that this advances our knowledge for that priority.
- We can then search the insights using priority tags to assess learning progress, identify gaps, and follow up with partners who posted insights to pursue further dialogue.
Over time, new priorities will be identified by the community -- for example, as we draft the scaling memo or after making space is completed -- we make a new insight post and assign it new unique name tag and label it as a `learning priority`. Priorities will accumulate both direct and tangential insights. Directly related insights are labeled with the insights unique tag `grower guild`. Whereas tangential insights share a tag with the insight, e.g. the grower guild insight is tagged with `construction`.
As priorities are completed or phased out, they can be tagged to reflect this as well. One important thing to note is that lessons aren't really "learned" until they have be applied in a new setting. So it would be wise to develop a tag for insights that are `adopted` or `applied` and follow up comments about how the insight was applied and whether their expectations were met or if this generated new questions.
Monthly Progress Meetings
- Recap activities
- review insights
- Tag
- Comment
- Identify gaps plan next steps
We use the following tags to label insights related the learning priorities above (tags are not case sensitive, but spaces matter).
- Tag: `priority sites`
- Tag: `learning culture`
- Tag: `cultural respect`
- Tag: `grower guild`
Towards the end of the project during the drafting period for the Scaling Memo. We will review the insights and transition them to public.
Authors
