What if one of the best ways to prevent burnout is not reducing the work—but changing how people experience it together?

Nonprofit leaders and volunteers often enter the work because they want to make a difference. But when every solved problem is replaced by another, even deeply committed people can lose sight of the progress they are making.

Jordan DeGree, executive director of the Iowa Nonprofit Alliance, joins Chris for a wide-ranging conversation about nonprofit leadership, volunteer engagement, organizational culture, creativity, and the surprisingly significant impact of better meetings.

Jordan explains why nonprofit organizations must periodically look beyond the problems immediately in front of them and reconnect people with the change they are working to create. He and Chris explore how small practices—expressing gratitude, sharing personal and professional highlights, creating space for quiet reflection, and intentionally strengthening relationships—can produce meaningful cultural change.

The conversation also examines how leaders can structure meetings so that ideas, rather than titles or personalities, become the focus. Jordan shares practical methods for reducing hierarchy, hearing from quieter participants, framing problems more effectively, and helping groups produce ideas they can actually implement.

Along the way, Jordan describes his unconventional path as an entrepreneur, artist, nonprofit leader, real estate investor, and founder of several ventures designed to help people bring ideas to life.

• Why nonprofit work can create burnout even among deeply committed people
• How reconnecting people to purpose can counter a constant problem-solving mindset
• Why maintaining the status quo can sometimes represent a meaningful victory
• How relationships and a sense of community help sustain volunteers
• Why small cultural practices can generate an outsized return
• How to structure meetings so quieter participants have an equal opportunity to contribute
• Why leaders should separate individual thinking from group discussion
• How better questions produce better ideas and more practical solutions
• Why respect and relationships are prerequisites for understanding another person’s perspective
• How Jordan built a career around creativity, experimentation, and helping others see beyond their perceived limit

Learn more about Jordan and all his ventures at jordandegree.com

It's time to wage war on crappy meetings! Download your free Field Guide to Better Meetings when you join the Next Level Leadership Community.

Learn more and sign up at ParksAndRestoration.com.

Better leaders. Better parks.

Parks and Restoration is a podcast and leadership development platform exploring leadership through the lens of ecology—for the land, via the people who serve it. Each episode is built for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who want practical lessons on culture, growth, impact, and organizational resilience.

Learn more at ParksAndRestoration.com.

What changes when you treat leadership as a privilege instead of a position?

Matt Doty has spent decades studying leadership in places where trust, accountability, and performance matter. After a 20-year career in the Iowa National Guard—including service as a first sergeant and command sergeant major—he carried those lessons into senior operational roles in the corporate world.

In this episode, Matt joins Chris and Teli to explore what values-driven leadership looks like in practice. They discuss why employees watch a leader’s actions more closely than their words, how senior leaders can stay connected to frontline work without becoming a distraction, and why earning a promotion is only the beginning of the work.

Matt also introduces two powerful ideas: the difference between an “I’ve arrived” leader and an “I’m still learning” leader, and the “time value of leadership”—the compounding impact of investing in your growth today.

Key takeaways

• Values give people a clear foundation for making decisions, developing skills, and understanding what success looks like.
• A leader’s behavior must match their words. Culture is shaped less by what leaders announce than by what they consistently model.
• Leaders do not need to perform every frontline task, but they should understand the work, spend time with the people doing it, and remain willing to help.
• Showing up on the front line should never be performative. The purpose is to listen, learn, remove barriers, and demonstrate that the work and the people doing it matter.
• Leadership development compounds over time. A small investment in becoming better today can influence teams and organizations for years.
• Developing young and emerging leaders is not separate from accomplishing the mission—it is part of sustaining the mission.
• Leadership is not something a person possesses because of rank or title. It is a privilege that must be earned every day through service to others.
• Leadership can feel lonely, but it does not have to be practiced alone. Mentors, peers, books, podcasts, and trusted colleagues can help leaders navigate difficult decisions.

Connect with Matt Doty

Email Matt at matt@privilegetolead.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Join the Next Level Leadership Community

Leadership is difficult work, but you do not have to figure it out alone. Join the Next Level Leadership Community to connect with other leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who are committed to learning, growing, and leading better.

Learn more at www.parksandrestoration.com.

About Parks & Restoration

Better leaders. Better parks.

Parks and Restoration is a podcast and leadership development platform exploring leadership through the lens of ecology — for the land, via the people who serve it. Each episode is built for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who want practical lessons on culture, growth, impact, and what it really takes to lead well.

Find out more and join the movement at www.parksandrestoration.com

How do we protect the places we love without forgetting the people who make that protection possible?

Most people enter parks and conservation because they care deeply about the land. But as Rachel Franchina explains in this episode, the longer you stay in this profession, the more you realize that conservation is ultimately about people. Great leaders don't just manage resources—they build relationships, develop others, and create communities that care enough to protect those resources for generations to come.

Rachel spent more than 20 years with the U.S. Forest Service before becoming Executive Director of the Society of Outdoor Recreation Professionals (SORP). We discuss the importance of developing people alongside the places they steward, the future of outdoor recreation leadership, and how SORP is helping build a stronger profession through initiatives like its new Outdoor Recreation Professional Competency Framework.

Learn more about SORP at https://recpro.org.

Key Takeaways

• Conservation succeeds or fails because of people—not just science.
• Why building relationships is the most important leadership skill in parks and conservation.
• Finding the balance between protecting natural resources and providing meaningful visitor experiences.
• How SORP is creating a stronger community for outdoor recreation professionals across North America.
• The value of mentorship, professional networks, and investing in the next generation of leaders.
• How the new Outdoor Recreation Professional Competency Framework can guide career development and organizational growth.
• Why agencies need to intentionally recruit, develop, and retain future conservation leaders.
• Practical leadership lessons for anyone responsible for caring for both people and place.

Join the Next Level Leadership Community

If you're ready to grow as a leader while making a greater impact on your organization, your community, and the places you care about, we'd love to have you join the Next Level Leadership Community.

You’ll get practical leadership insights, invites to meaningful conversations, and a growing network of professionals committed to building stronger organizations through better leadership.

Learn more and join us at https://www.parksandrestoration.com.

About Parks & Restoration

Better leaders. Better parks.

Parks and Restoration is a podcast and leadership development platform exploring leadership through the lens of ecology — for the land, via the people who serve it. Each episode is built for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who want practical lessons on culture, growth, impact, and what it really takes to lead well.

Find out more and join the movement at https://www.parksandrestoration.com

Why would an award-winning filmmaker move to Iowa planning to retire... only to end up making one of the state's most ambitious conservation documentaries?

That's exactly what happened to Charlie Morris.

After years producing conservation films around the world—from South Africa's disappearing great white sharks to threatened forests on the East Coast—Charlie arrived in Iowa intending to leave filmmaking behind. Then he started asking a simple question:

"Why is everyone telling me not to swim in the water?"

That question led him down a rabbit hole of water quality, prairie restoration, farming, cancer rates, and the remarkable people dedicating their lives to protecting Iowa's natural resources.

His new project, The Iowa Prairie Documentary Project, is more than just a film. It's a multimedia effort combining documentary filmmaking, podcasts, interviews, articles, and eventually a book—all designed to tell the deeper story of Iowa's landscapes and the people fighting to restore them. Find more about the project: Facebook, website, podcast, YouTube

In this episode, we explore storytelling as a tool for conservation, why asking good questions matters, and how an outsider's perspective can sometimes reveal what lifelong residents no longer notice.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why Charlie abandoned retirement to make a documentary about Iowa.
• How storytelling can change minds in ways facts alone often cannot.
• The surprising advantage of approaching conservation with a beginner's mindset.
• Why Charlie believes full interviews are just as important as the finished film.
• What he's learned after interviewing more than 100 Iowans.
• The challenges of producing a documentary on a politically charged topic.
• Why Iowa's landscapes may be one of America's best-kept secrets.
• What conservation professionals can learn about telling difficult stories with courage and authenticity.

Ready to take your leadership to the next level?
Join the Next Level Leadership Community at parksandrestoration.com for exclusive leadership discussions, live meetups, bonus resources, and a growing network of parks, conservation, and natural resource professionals committed to becoming better leaders.

About Parks & Restoration
Parks & Restoration is a podcast and leadership development platform exploring leadership through the lens of ecology — for the land, via the people who serve it. Each episode is designed for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who want practical wisdom on leadership, culture, stewardship, and building organizations that thrive.

Are great leaders born...or are they built through experience, relationships, and deliberate practice?

After spending ten years as a junior high English teacher, Teli Van Rycke made the kind of career change most people only talk about. Today, as Regional Director of Workforce Innovation at the Greater Burlington Partnership, she develops leaders, strengthens workplace culture, and helps shape the workforce of tomorrow.

Together we unpack several assumptions about leadership—from the myth of the "born leader" to imposter syndrome, hiring, organizational culture, mentorship, discipline, and why putting people first may be the most effective way to accomplish any mission.

• Why the idea of the "born leader" may be one of leadership's biggest myths.
• Why great organizational culture retains talented people better than pay or perks.
• Why putting people first is often the best way to accomplish the mission.
• How recruiting relationships often outperform traditional hiring processes.
• Why imposter syndrome doesn't mean you're unqualified.
• How mentorship accelerates growth and confidence.
• What the Working Genius framework reveals about building stronger teams.
• Why discipline extends far beyond the gym.
• Teli's leadership philosophy: Be the leader you want to have.

Ready to take your leadership to the next level?

Join the Next Level Leadership Community at parksandrestoration.com.

Parks and Restoration is a podcast and leadership development platform exploring leadership through the lens of ecology — for the land, via the people who serve it. Each episode is built for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who want practical wisdom on culture, growth, and what it really takes to lead well.

Better leaders. Better parks.

What do a lightning storm, a white suit jacket, and a barbecue competition that ran out of food have in common? They all showed up at Burlington River Days 2026 — and they all left Chris with something worth talking about.

This week's episode is a little different. Fresh off three days on the riverfront (and one very memorable Saturday night with a multi-platinum rock band, a delay, and skies that opened up right on cue), Chris shares three leadership lessons straight from the after-action review — one he got right, one that's got him questioning conventional wisdom, and one he's still learning the hard way.

Three Leadership Lessons:

• Don't fret over what you can't control. For an entire week leading up to an outdoor festival, Chris didn't open his weather app once. That was a choice — and it paid off. When a storm rolled in Saturday night and delayed the headlining act, the plan they'd built did its job. The lesson: know what you can't control, build your contingencies, trust your people, and don't let uncertainty eat your mental bandwidth.
• "Be yourself" — but maybe not always. Chris developed a full-blown character for Burlington River Days' social media: white suit jacket, Panama Jack hat, irreverent viral videos. It generated hundreds of thousands of impressions and was completely unlike who he is the other 51 weeks of the year. So what does that mean for the authenticity we're all told to lead with? Chris doesn't have a clean answer yet — but he's asking the question, and he's inviting you into the conversation.
• Set clear expectations. Work backwards from the end goal. The barbecue ran out of food in ten minutes. The beer lines were long. The common thread? The committee knew what they were doing and why — but they never got explicit about the visitor experience they were trying to create. What should someone feel walking away from this event? What stories should they tell Monday morning? Without that clarity defined upfront, communication downstream gets fuzzy. Chris has preached this one before. He still dropped the ball. He's owning it.

Key Takeaways:

• Worry is a tax on mental bandwidth — and it doesn't change the outcome
• There may be a meaningful difference between inauthenticity and context-specific performance
• Working backwards from the customer's experience, not just your organization's goals, changes how you communicate with your whole team
• Overcommunication isn't about more meetings — it's about getting alignment on the end state and repeating it until it sticks

Chris wants to hear from you. Got thoughts on the "be yourself" question? Reach out at chris@parksandrestoration.com, use the contact form at parksandrestoration.com, or find him on the Burlington River Days Facebook page.

What if a robin-sized bird just flew 1,700 miles in 48 hours — and Iowa was a critical stop along the way?

That's not a hypothetical. It happened. And we only know because of the Motus Wildlife Tracking Network.

In this episode, Chris sits down with Anna Buckardt Thomas, avian ecologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Diversity Program, to dig into one of the coolest conservation science stories happening right now. Anna initiated the Motus network in Iowa, growing it from eight stations in 2021 to more than 40 — and the data coming out of it is rewriting what we thought we knew about bird migration.

Motus is a continent-spanning, collaborative radio telemetry system operated by Birds Canada. Researchers across the hemisphere tag wildlife on a shared frequency, and a network of receiver stations picks up those signals and feeds them into an open-source database. The result: for the first time, we can follow the individual journey of a Lesser Yellowlegs from Colombia to the Arctic and back, or watch a Wood Thrush return to the exact same Iowa woodlot two years running.

Key takeaways:

• What the Motus system is and why it's a game-changer for understanding small birds and bats that can't carry GPS units.
• Why Iowa matters at a continental scale: nearly a billion birds fly through the state each fall migration season.
• The Lesser Yellowlegs that traveled 1,700 miles in 48 hours — clocked at 100 mph between an Iowa station and the Mississippi River.
• A Tree Swallow that stopped over near Waubonsie State Park for 30 days fueling up before continuing south.
• Iowa's Wood Thrush tagging project: 14 of 15 tagged birds returned to the same exact Iowa territory the following spring.
• How Anna pitched the program internally by anchoring the ask to data that already showed Iowa's migratory importance.
• The education opportunity for parks and nature centers — and how Des Moines County Conservation is getting its own station at Big Hollow Recreation Area.
• What to do with all of this: plant native species, tell the stories, and give people concrete actions.

We often talk on this show about leading with vision and building on existing organizational strengths. Anna's approach to growing the Iowa Motus network is a masterclass in exactly that — she didn't start from scratch, she started with a billion data points on a radar map and said, we need to understand what's happening here. The rest built itself.

Explore the data yourself: motus.org — click on Explore Data, find Iowa stations, and go down the wormhole. You've been warned.

Connect with Anna: Search "Anna Buckardt Thomas Iowa DNR" to find her contact info on the DNR website.

About Parks & Restoration

Parks & Restoration is the show for parks and natural resource professionals who want to be better leaders for their organizations, communities, and the lands and waters they steward. Every other Tuesday, Chris Lee shares practical strategies — grounded in ecology and culture-building — to help you become the leader your team needs.

Join the Next Level Leadership community at parksandrestoration.com for bi-weekly insights, free tools, and invites to exclusive meetups.

Subscribe, leave a review, and follow along on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube by searching "Parks and Restoration Podcast."

What if your local conservation foundation didn't just sell raffle tickets at a banquet — what if it headlined a three-day riverfront festival that drew 12,000 people and netted over $20,000 for conservation?

That's exactly what happened in Burlington, Iowa. And it started with a half-baked idea about boat races on the Mississippi.

In this episode, Chris sits down with Chris Gram, Executive Director of the Greater Burlington Convention and Visitors Bureau, to tell the origin story of Burlington River Days — a three-day riverfront festival featuring live concerts, a barbecue competition, a boat parade, River Days Olympics, and a boat giveaway — all organized in six months by a committee of six people with no event experience, no security staff, and a VIP fence held together with zip ties and conduit welded by a financial advisor.

But more than a great story, this episode is a masterclass in what happens when you assemble the right people, refuse to say "can't," and let your local foundation be more than a pass-through for tax-deductible donations. It's also a direct follow-up to Episode 91 with Hannah Inman — and proof that the "don't be afraid" ethos applies just as much in Burlington as it does in Des Moines.

Key topics:

• The catalysts behind Burlington River Days and how it came together in six months
• Why "don't tell me what I can't do" is a leadership philosophy, not just a personality trait
• How to build a committee of people who default to "how do we make this work?"
• The role of tourism partners, local nonprofits, and community foundations in making big ideas real
• Why public agency leaders need a nimble nonprofit partner to take entrepreneurial risks
• How embracing your critics with humor can become one of your best marketing moves

Resources mentioned:

• Burlington River Days
• Partners for Conservation Foundation
• Greater Burlington Convention and Visitors Bureau
• Burlington Riverfront Entertainment
• Episode 91: Mindset Shifts That Grow Nonprofits into Fundraising Powerhouses with Hannah Inman

About Parks and Restoration Podcast

The Parks and Restoration Podcast is for parks and conservation professionals who want to become better leaders, because better leadership creates better ecosystems, stronger teams, and more meaningful impact. Learn more at: ParksandRestoration.com