New Timeline Institute Online Courses
The Institute’s online courses combine instruction, coaching, group learning and step-by-step templates based on 30+ years of working with communities, regions and supporting organizations. They offer you guided access to proven approaches we use in our work and models from other communities.
Many courses are geared toward the unique needs of small towns, rural communities, neighborhoods and the organizations that partner with and serve them. All are flexible, cost-effective, and results-focused. Each is designed so you connect with and learn from peers in other places while you produce something of value for your own.
We are confident that you, your organization and your community will benefit from your investment. While we cannot return your time, we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee on every course.
Free Continuing Education Learning Credits
Through a partnership with American Trails, Harbinger is offering free learning credits for selected courses starting in Winter/Spring 2024. Credits are available by request, at no charge beyond the course registration fee, contingent on completing the entire course and a brief post-course quiz. American Trails is a certified provider, making it possible for Harbinger to offer credits for:
American Institute of Certified Planners Continuing Maintenance (AICP CM)
Landscape Architecture Continuing Education System (LA CES PDH)
CEU/PDH equivalency petition for other accepting organizations
Credits are available by request, and are contingent on completing the entire course and a brief post-course quiz.
Cohorts, Custom Courses and Workshops
We offer custom courses and workshop versions of our courses for organizations, communities and conferences, and arrange special pricing and group coaching for cohorts of five or more in our public courses. Inquire for more information or to make arrangements for your group.
Good words from course participants and partners
Winter/SPRING 2024 Course Calendar
Creative Placemaking: Creating Communities We Love Through Arts & Culture, Diverse Partners and Community Spaces Thursdays, March 28, April 4 & 11. Three 2-hour sessions + Q&A. [Learning credits available]
Facilitation Training for Making Meetings Work and Consensus That Work. Tuesdays, April 16 & May 7, 2024. Two 2-hour sessions. Date change!
Do-It-Yourself Trail User Research You Can Start Right Away Wednesdays, April 10-May 1. Four 1-hour sessions + optional Q&A. [Learning credits available]
Tell the Economic Story of Your Trails and Conserved Lands Without Hiring an Economist Thursdays, April 18-May 16. Five 1-hour sessions. [Learning credits available]
FALL 2024 Course Calendar
Tell the Economic Story of Your Trails and Conserved Lands Without Hiring an Economist Wednesdays, Sept. 18-Oct. 16. Five 1-hour sessions. [Learning credits available]
Tell the Economic Story of Your National and State Parks and Heritage Areas Without Hiring an Economist Wednesdays, Sept. 25-Oct. 23. Five 1-hour sessions. [Learning credits available]
Creative Placemaking: Creating Communities We Love Through Arts & Culture, Diverse Partners and Community Spaces Tuesdays, Oct. 1, 8 & 15. Three 2-hour sessions + Q&A. [Learning credits available]
Do-It-Yourself Trail User Research You Can Start Right Away Thursdays, Oct. 24-Nov. 14. Four 1-hour sessions + optional Q&A. [Learning credits available]
Outdoor Recreation Roadmap: A Community-Led Approach to Leveraging Your Natural Assets for Economic Success and Local Renewal Thursdays, Oct. 10-Nov. 14, 2024. Six 1-hour sessions. [Learning credits available]
Thanks so much for the excellent course. It was applicable and immediately useful. So often, I feel webinars or trainings are too zoomed out or big picture, or too hypothetical—your course was not, and I appreciate that. I really feel like it helped us work through figuring out what information we were actually trying to gather with our visitor survey, and what survey answers could be used singly or in combination with other answers to give us that information.
• Hanne Beener, Chelan-Douglas Land Trust
Working with Michele was a pleasure. She and Harbinger were more than flexible, and went out of their way to do everything possible to make the Economic Benefit course financially feasible for our network members. On top of that, Michele worked with us ahead of time to ensure that the course included information and examples that were relevant to our state.
We started a weekly post-course discussion group (highly recommended), which allowed participants to share ideas and compare notes. As a result, we’ve been working on plans, both at our individual organizations and collectively, for putting what we learning into action. Michele has been supporting our efforts with follow up coaching.
• Donna Bissett, Maine Coast Heritage Trust & Maine Land Trust Network
This is a great opportunity for small communities and organizations that may not have the funding to hire top consulting talent. We’ve worked with Michele since 2017 and she has been so much more than a consultant as we’ve developed our own strategies for revitalizing our rural economy through outdoor recreation and sustainable tourism. We would not be where we are today without her coaching and strategic services.
• Nicole Manapol, Former Community Development Specialist at SUNY Geneseo & Director and Lead Strategist at Letchworth Gateway Villages
Course Catalog
All courses can be customized as workshops, trainings, courses or webinars for your organization or audience. Don’t see the course you want on the schedule? Inquire about future dates for public offerings.
The catalog is organized into five sections: Decision Making and Meeting Management • Community and Economic Development • Hands-On Research and Economic Analysis • Personal Resilience • Planning and Strategy
Decision Making and Meeting Management
Consensus That Works: Formal Consensus Decision Making for Groups and Organizations
Six instructional hours. Learn a clear, comprehensive, step-by-step decision-making process that promotes collaboration, builds respect, expands participation and results in decisions that drive cohesive action without leaving people behind who are opposed to the path chosen. Consensus That Works offers a clear alternative that builds on the creative contributions of the group to craft decisions that fit your purpose, mission and goals and keep your organization moving forward. The process can be adapted for large or small groups, whether as formal as work teams or nonprofit boards or as informal as neighborhood groups or classrooms.
Making Meetings Work: Better Meetings Through Structure, Process and Facilitation
Six instructional hours. Learn a meeting planning, facilitation and management system propelled by an underlying commitment to engaging the best of all participants to the shared purposes that bring them together in the first place. Meetings That Work is a training for everyone who plans, facilitates or participates in meetings. Learn and practice skills and strategies to help you improve your organization’s meetings and decision-making from wherever you sit. This approach is equally useful for corporate teams, government task forces, nonprofit boards and membership and other formal organizations as it is for less formally structured groups like religious congregations, neighborhood groups, classrooms or families.
Facilitator Training for Making Meetings Work and Consensus That Works
4 instructional hours. Learn and practice skills and strategies for helping groups implement the Consensus That Works or Making Meetings Work systems. This course is a deep dive that examines the details of these related processes to enable you to incorporate it into your own facilitation style and practice. Recommended for experienced facilitators or for participants in our Consensus That Works or Making Meetings Work courses who want to advance their facilitation skills.
Community & Economic Development
Six instructional hours. Learn how to make the outdoor recreation economy work for your community to generate more awareness and buy-in, make quick progress that can be sustained over time, and create meaningful changes that make a difference for your community’s business and economic vitality, physical health and confidence. Learn a step-by-step process that you can adapt to use “nature-based placemaking” to transform how your community sees, talks about and invests in itself to make it a more attractive place to live, visit and do business.
Six instructional hours. Leverage arts and culture to engage, revitalize and reshape communities. Creative placemaking is as much about “doing” as it is about planning, engaging the power of diverse partnerships and hands-on participation to turn under-appreciated assets into focal points for a new community vitality.
Do-It-Yourself Community Food Tourism and Agritourism Assessments
Four instructional hours. Whether your community — or, better, your region — is just getting started or looking to take food and agritourism to the next level, assessing your local food tourism assets and opportunities can provide a solid base of information, ideas and a roadmap for moving ahead. In this course, you will learn and adapt proven approaches that engage community resources without hiring a marketing consultant, economist or business development specialist.
Six instructional hours. Learn proven approaches from the world of crowdfunding that will help you lay the groundwork for a successful community crowdfunding campaign—and for a repeatable process that you can use to create, start, finish and sustain community projects again and again, even if you decide not to crowdfund. Bring your current challenge, or a project or initiative that you’re incubating to this interactive course.
Hands-On Research and Economic Analysis
Learn and adapt proven approaches that engage community resources without hiring an economist, consultant or communications shop.
Tell the Economic Story of Your Conserved Lands and Trails Without Hiring an Economist
Five instructional hours. Understanding the range of economic benefits from your land conservation and trails program can help you coalesce support among local and state officials, expand your circle of allies and partners to include economic developers and the local business community, and build public support. Learn to research, analyze and communicate a range of economic and community benefits associated with your programs, trails and conserved lands.
Five instructional hours. Economic impact is an important selling point for funding farmland protection and the whole array of work related to strengthening local food systems and revitalizing rural agricultural landscapes and communities. Learn to paint a broad, research and data-based picture of the economic effects of your land trust or municipal, county, state or regional farmland protection and food system programs, and tell that story to support fundraising, partnerships and stronger community relationships.
Five instructional hours. A tremendous body of studies has substantiated the economic value of parks, heritage areas and sites, and other protected areas. These can be useful in helping you make your case, but it’s even more compelling to speak directly about the benefits of your park, your heritage area, your community. Learn to paint a broad, research and data-based picture of the economic effects of your park and tell that story to support advocacy, fundraising, economic development, and stronger community-park relationships. You will learn and adapt a proven approach that engages community resources without hiring an economist, consultant or communications shop.
Do-It-Yourself Trail Research You Can Start Right Away
Three instructional hours. In this course, you will learn how to pull together—and pull off—a meaningful trail study that you can afford. You’ll emerge with a plan for a trail study that you can implement right away, whether you have money or not, using targeted volunteer effort, free or low-cost tools, and an approach focused on what you most want or need to learn. You will also learn how to analyze your results, present findings, and use your study to catalyze action.
Do-It-Yourself Visitor Research for Parks, Trails, Heritage Sites and the Towns that Serve Them
Three instructional hours. Get a handle on how locals and visitors use trails, parks and heritage sites —and what that means for your community—without breaking the bank or tearing your hair out. Learn a resource-efficient approach that helps you gather information and generate insights to help you manage or attract visitors, help local businesses benefit from nearby trails, heritage sites and parks; plan and fine-tune programs; tweak your marketing; raise money and forge partnerships
Personal Resilience
Six instructional hours. In this course, you’ll learn HeartMath’s science-based tools and strategies for taking control of your mental and emotional well-being—reducing stress, feeling more energetic, sleeping soundly, and being more resilient, adaptable and able to keep your cool. Based on over 29 years of research, and supported by more than 300 independent peer-reviewed studies, these techniques will help you take charge of how you feel and use your renewed clarity to become a stronger and better influence for others in your sphere: your family, co-workers, class, team, church, volunteer organization or neighbors.
Six instructional hours. Is it time for you to change your mindset? Maybe you’ve been trying to shift into a more positive mode, upgrade your attitudes, or get out of that feeling of being stuck in the same circle repeating the same patterns and experiences and feelings over and over and over.
In this course, you’ll learn HeartMath’s science-based tools and strategies for proven to cut through emotional patterns and habitual reactions that are sapping your vitality and help you create physiological changes that reinforce happier, healthier patterns that give you energy, enthusiasm and confidence. And you’ll learn why they work, and how tapping the power of your physical heart can help you accelerate out of the same old cycles and into a renewed experience of living. Based on over 30 years of research, and supported by more than 300 independent peer-reviewed studies, these techniques will help you take charge of how you feel, free up energy, time and creativity, and upgrade the way you operate in daily life.
Planning and Strategy
Exploratory Scenarios Planning for Community Collaboration, Adaptation and Action
Four and a half instructional hours. Learn to use Exploratory Scenarios Planning to engage community members and stakeholders on complex and pressing issues like “over-tourism,” rapid growth and development, the effects of climate change, economic change and volatility, inequity, housing affordability and technological change. XSP can help your community deal with uncertainty by envisioning and considering a range of possible futures and creating an adaptive approach that responds to foreseen and unforeseen changes as they happen. It works even if you feel your town is too small to make much of an impact or to take the reins, you’re feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change, or you don't have a lot of resources to invest in engaging your community.
Using Scenarios Planning for Nonprofits and Community Initiatives in Uncertain Times
Six instructional hours. Scenarios planning works better than traditional, linear planning approaches when uncertainty is high and the future seems unpredictable. This course will help you identify alternate future scenarios and conditions that could shape the work of your nonprofit or community organization in very different ways; identify action steps that will be effective and relevant in a variety of these alternate situations; gain enough insight to make choices with confidence; and identify key inflection points to help you identify when changes in conditions signal a need to take change direction.