Jacob Bornstein Shares His Strategies for Building Consensus, Even Under the Most Difficult Circumstances
Newsletter 373 - August 4, 2025
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On May 23, 2025, I (Heidi Burgess) talked with Jacob Bornstein, who is a long-time consensus builder and a co-founder of Better Together America (along with Caleb Christen and Vinay Orekondy), whom we interviewed earlier. Jacob is also President of the Mediators' Foundation (and BTA is also hosted by Mediator's Foundation, as are many of the other projects and programs we have profiled on BI).
Jacob is an experienced and highly successful leader in stakeholder engagement and collaborative strategy in both the public and nonprofit sectors. Some of the project topics he's led at the local, state, and national levels include climate, climate justice, outdoor recreation, environmental conservation, water policy, behavioral health, affordable housing, firearm death and injury, and education.
He is also the founder and Principal of Wellstone Collaborative Strategies and a founding board member of the Civic Consulting Collaborative. After 22 years of working with businesses, state and local government, nonprofits, and foundations, he specializes in uncovering the invisible threads that bind diverse and divergent stakeholders together to solve a challenge. Prior to consulting, Jacob was focused on western water for nearly a decade and a half. This included being the executive director of the Colorado Watershed Network and developing and facilitating Colorado's Water Plan for the Department of Natural Resources.
We started our conversation by talking about Jacob's extensive history in consensus-building, particularly (but not exclusively) in the environmental arena. He explained that he moved 14 times as a kid, which gave him a good idea of the many different perspectives people had in different parts of the country. "I think experiencing both Brooklyn, New York in the midst of the crack cocaine epidemic, and rural Oregon, gave me a sense that people come with different perspectives that I've always carried with me. It's sort of part of my personality."
Jacob started out in facilitation by "being thrown into the deep end," as he described it. He was working for the State of Colorado, staffing a large-scale consensus-building process around water development and usage in the state. That process involved nine regional roundtables, and one statewide, "Interbasin" Roundtable with representatives from each of the regional roundtables. The Interbasin Roundtable started out with an outside facilitator, but then the Governor changed, as did the head of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The new director of DNR noted that Jacob was already doing much of the coordination work for the regional and statewide process, and asked him to "add facilitation [of the statewide Interbasin Roundtable] to what he was doing.
So he threw me into the deep end, and we're talking a room with 35 people, head of Denver Water, head of the Colorado River Water Conservation District. In addition to those two individuals, we had industrial and environmental and agricultural and recreational reps. So very diverse perspectives from across the state. And as Mark Twain said," whiskey's for drinking and water's for fighting," right? That's like the mantra of water in the west.
So it's a bit of a miracle that we were able to get to consensus with that group, and I can explain how we did it. But that was a really exciting deep end to be thrown into. I had been supporting it for years before I was facilitating the final throes of the water plan. But yeah, that's essentially where I really got the bug. This is what I'm meant to be doing.
I asked Jacob, both in terms of this process, as well as in terms of his current work with Better Together America, "How do you get people who are at each other's throats, who hate each other, distrust each other, and are used to seeing each other in court, willing to sit down around a table and work together? Here's his answer in terms of the water roundtable.
I think first, because this was important, the government was behind it. It started under a Republican governor and then migrated to two subsequent Democratic governors over the 10 years that it took to get from formation to a water plan. So it was a 10-year process. And so a lot of people said "yes,"because they were afraid decisions would be made that would hurt them, right? So they were not coming out of the generosity of their hearts to collaborate.
The second thing that was really important was to get some cohesiveness within the regions.
Many of these regions were really diverse, Jacob explained They had wealthy, environmentally-oriented places like Aspen, along with rural, conservative areas around Rifle or Grand Junction. At the beginning, representatives engaged in a lot of what Jacob called "horse trading"
I'll support your thing, if you support my thing. Okay. That works. And that allowed people to get to know each other, allowed folks to have activities outside of the roundtable meetings to connect and tour other people's facilities or projects and the like. So that relational capacity along with the structural horse-trading capacity was really important.
The also had a lot of data to back the process up and this data was collected and analyzed collaboratively.
The state had spent over a million dollars in developing our understanding of water resources in the state. And we had the roundtable start to buy in on the next iteration. So what is it? How should we do this better? How should we calculate water demands for communities? How should we think about water supplies? Should we consider climate? How should we consider climate?
So they had buy-in. Sure, there were lots of disagreements, but lots of buy-in into what data they needed to have in order to have a picture of what water needs and supplies should look like in the future. So having a data-driven process was really important.
The consultant they hired to help with this process first came back with 48 different water availability/use scenarios to consider, and not surprisingly, everyone's eyes glazed over. Jacob worked with them to whittle them down to five scenarios, focusing addressing:
What's going to happen with water supply, especially in relation to climate? What's going to happen with demand? How much water are we going to need, especially considering municipal and community needs? And then third, what are public attitudes going to be? Is it going to be a green culture in which everybody's going to want to conserve, or is it going to be a, "Crap, we're in crisis. We need to use as much as we can."
And so we set out all those parameters and then described five points that describe the outside edges for those pieces. And then we wrote those up, and then we had the basin roundtables each develop using a portfolio and trade-off tool that we developed solutions for those scenarios. ...We were the first state to bring in scenario planning and an adaptive plan for how to address it at the time.
And then the amazing thing is, all of these nine roundtables started being like, "Well, I didn't know that would have this impact to endangered fish. I didn't know it would have this impact to agriculture and drying up water on agricultural lands." And we saw everybody start to come to the middle, rather than shouting, "This is the solution!" out on the fringe edge of the possibilities.
So all of those portfolios were then brought to the statewide body, and we wrestled with it and came up with the set of portfolios that was essentially the average of all the other roundtables. And then the critical thing that we did was say, regardless of each of these futures, what do we need to do now, no matter what the future is, and what do we need to do to prepare for those possibilities, for those possible futures, that's a low risk? Like what studies or policies or whatever do we need to put in place? So we called that "the no and low regrets strategy."
And that was one of the places we got consensus that was really exciting. So we had, I would say, relational capacity, data-driven, scenario planning where everyone could see themselves in the final product, and then an opportunity to identify the common path forward that was needed, regardless of that future that really helped bring them together. So it's a pretty complex series of efforts that we ran through to get consensus.
We discussed more of the details of the water roundtable process in the full interview, as well as another process that Jacob facilitated in Cleveland, Ohio, which was not at all well funded or staffed, which made the process challenging in different ways.
I then switched gears, and asked Jacob to talk about Better Together America, one of his newer projects. We'd already talked to Caleb Christen and Vinay Orekondy about BTA before, but I assumed many people watching the interview or reading this newsletter might not remember that post. So I asked Jacob to give us a quick review of what BTA is.
Better Together America is working to stitch together the network of place-based [collaborative] efforts across the country. There's plenty of existing networks. So how do we leverage those existing networks and independent efforts to have a more all-in approach to addressing community well-being and resilience? [Their answer was Civic Hubs.] So civic hubs tend to focus on three things: community building, collaborative solution generation around issues important to them and their community or state. And then lastly, implementation of those efforts.
So whether that's advocacy or that collective action type of work that I was talking about, or working cooperatively with government, there's all sorts of ways to implement or do any of these different pieces. So, in the ideal sense, civic hubs are a coalition of local efforts that come together to do that work, to really understand what the community needs are and to collaboratively figure out ways to address those various needs and move forward with implementing solutions.
I again asked Jacob the earlier question, with a new twist: "how do you get people who distrust each other, are polarized, who hate each other to come together, and decide together what the pressing problems are, and then work together to solve them? In other words, how do you get folks together if you haven't identified first what you're going to work on (such as water, which everyone cared about from the beginning).
I think that in some cases, you need to pick something that you just know, based off of survey data or community data, that is very important to the community. So there is the opportunity to start with something like, for instance, affordable housing? We know in many parts of the country, it's the, if not the top issue, it is one of the top issues that people are facing. So you can pick a topic. And I do think the way to bring diverse folks with diverse perspectives into the room is to have an issue that they galvanize around.
That being said, we have a history of understanding that if you ask the community to help envision the future of their community and identify the challenges that are in the way of achieving that vision, that diverse people from across the demographic, political, and power dimensions will come together and want to inform what the future of their community looks like and what the challenges are that get in the way of that. So I think it's still around something, right? It's around who are we going to be in 2040 or whatever the timeframe is. And that can be really powerful way to engage people. And then from there, you're like, "Oh, well, one of the big things is affordable housing or flooding along this creek or whatever the challenge is. And then you start to create collaborative processes around each of those and a roadmap for how to navigate each of those challenges and find ways to solve them.
I then went back to the question of government involvement in these local problem-solving processes, because Jacob had said that was really important to the success of the water roundtables. But I knew from participating in BTA's first "Accelerator Workshop," that many did not want to or try to get government involved at the beginning.
It depends on the idea. So let's take childcare, for instance, in Montrose. So in that case, they have a lot of challenges in terms of capacity and sharing resources. A big part of the solution had nothing to do with government. It had to do with the childcare providers coordinating. What they couldn't do without government and probably government at the state level, is solve the problem of how much providers were paid, how much certain policies got in the way of credentialing childcare providers. Those types of challenges are government-related. And so in a way, it depends on the scale of the problem you're trying to solve and what the likely solutions are. Some problems necessitate the involvement of government, and you might not have a government that's cooperative.
[That's where the breadth of BTA activities can be helpful.] One of the things about Better Together America is that the whole field of community building — like service projects or even understanding right and left perspectives, the whole field of dialogue and deliberation, and the whole field of structural reform can come together. Because when you don't have collaborative governance, but you need it to solve a specific problem like affordable housing, then you can connect the dots and say, "We can't solve affordable housing because our government is not being accountable to the people. So let's get money out of politics. Let's fix gerrymandering. Let's put in ranked-choice voting, whatever the solution is." And then all of a sudden, instead of being this theoretical thing, if we change this, then it will impact people's lives, the people that we care about. So it changes it from being so abstract, which much of the field is, to actually happening where it's needed and affecting people's lives directly.
In addition to talking more about how BTA was formed, and what various hubs are doing, we talked fairly extensively about how BTA plans to scale up these efforts to have a wider impact. Jacob noted that the existing BTA hubs have a service area of about 10% of the population (though many are just beginning, so they haven't really affected their full populations yet. But BTA is putting together a plan to build to 250 hubs over the next several years, which would cover about 50% of the population. But, Jacob stressed, BTA does not "own" the hubs, and doesn't want to be, or plan to be at the center of all of this. They just see themselves as the catalyst, the starter. For more on that, how these hubs might "trickle up" to affect national politics, and much, much more on consensus opportunities and examples.
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