"If you are not at the table, then you are on the menu"

Source: Stanford Social Innovation Review 

So says Sheri Brady in this blog post. "For long-lasting, effective change, collaborative efforts must fully engage diverse community voices. To help collective impact live up to its promise of meeting complex problems by creating systems-level change, we must fully engage representatives from within the communities most impacted by systems change."  

Under the Cohesive Wildland Fire Strategy, true collaboration is presented as the method by which we have a realistic shot at changing the catastrophic trajectory we are currently on.  Unless we engage all the stakeholders who have "skin in the game" we will not make meaningful progress towards the end game - a reduction in risk across landscapes.