2024-25 Fellowship Residency II Complete

Amy Whitesides presents to an audience of her cohort members and guest advisors

On February 13-15, LAF welcomed Cohort 8 of the LAF Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership back to Washington, DC, for the second 2.5-day residency of their year-long program.

The 2024-25 LAF Fellows and their topics are:

David Buckley Borden - Emergent Mutualism: Closing the Science-Communication Gap through Collaboration between Ecology and Design
Anya Domlesky - Infrastructure, Rescripted: The Public Realm on a Mass Scale
Aaron Hernandez - Toronto Policy Atlas: A Graphic Guide to Living Landscapes
Brad Howe - Landscapes are Learning Labs
Forbes Lipschitz - Feral Farms: Midwestern Recipes for Rewilding Agriculture
Amy Whitesides - Toward a National Agro-Forest

Residency II is designed to narrow the focus of the Fellows’ work and help them to hone their transformational leadership skills. Fellows are encouraged to dig deep into the “Why?” of their projects to identify their own motivations for this work as well as the reasons their projects are important for the profession, the environment, and society as a whole. They are pushed to articulate the change they wish to see and reflect upon how their work to date and moving forward will help bring about that change. These key messages become the core of the presentations they will deliver in June at the LAF Innovation + Leadership Symposium, which marks the end of the fellowship year but often serves as the launch pad for long-term transformational initiatives.

To guide the Fellows in this process, Lead Facilitators Lucinda Sanders (CEO and Partner at OLIN) and Laura Solano (Partner at MVVA) were joined in person and virtually by Guest Advisors and Subject Matter Experts from landscape architecture and adjacent fields. By asking thoughtful questions and sharing their observations, these individuals helped the Fellows see their work from different perspectives and gain insights into how to make their projects and their leadership more effective.

Thank you to the Guest Advisors:

Jennifer Dowdell, Practice Leader: Landscape Ecology, Planning, & Design, Biohabitats
Alma Du Solier, Studio Director, Hood Design Studio
Nick Jabs, Senior Associate, PORT | 2019-20 LAF Fellow
Rebecca Popowsky, Research Associate, OLIN | Wilks Family Director, Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania

And thank you to the Subject Matter Experts:

Candace Damon, Partner and Board of Directors Co-Chair, HR&A Advisors
Lisa Jennings, Senior Manager of Career Discovery and Diversity, American Society of Landscape Architects
Thabo Lenneiye, Managing Director of the Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund, Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
Jane Wolff, Professor, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto

Mark your calendar for Thursday, June 5 when the Fellows will present the culmination of their work at LAF's 2025 Innovation + Leadership Symposium. You can join us in Washington, DC, or tune in to the livestream.