Blog

In March 2007, the Leadership Learning community (LLC) held a Health Leadership Learning Circle retreat near Napa, California. The retreat gathered 30 health leadership development funders, practitioners, and evaluators to share resources, tools, information and successful approaches to supporting, developing and connecting health leadership. Ginny Oehler and Tracy Patterson were both at the retreat. read more »

In October 2009, at a Leadership Learning Community (LLC) Bay Area Circle, Miho Kim and Celia Davis of the DataCenter shared their learning about the “Shared Leadership” model adopted by the Center in 2006.  The two hour meeting was very well-attended, raising many questions, which as a result of the time constraints went unanswered.  The high level of interest and participation in the topic appears to reflect the degree to which many in the nonprofit sector are beginning to explore different models and ways of working together.  Miho Kim generously agreed to a follow up conversation with me to flesh out some of the questions raised at the convening (this piece is a synthesis of our interview and the Bay Area circle convening). read more »

On Evaluation... read more »

• Donors looking to make donations to non-profit organizations have recently been encouraged to look at program evaluation in order to measure the organization’s impact rather than looking at financial ratios.  However, PhilanTopic publishes a post explaining that while it is true that program evaluation is important, financial evaluation is important as well.  An organization’s financial stability, its ability to service any debt it has and how much money it has raised in excess of expenses can be learned from financial evaluation; all of these should be important factors for donors when deciding which organization they would like to donate to.

It’s important to learn about collective leadership from people who are doing it.  Over a year ago the Leadership Learning Community held a two day Learning Lab, “Learning about Collective Leadership” with 30 community activists who were part of the Kellogg Fellows for Community Change.  The KFCC program focused on building collective leadership capacity within communities. The group came from rural and urban regions all over the US.  We have attached the summary of work done by this group that describes lessons and questions that emerged over the two days and demonstrates the ways in which many of the tips that we have shared over the past several months were put to use to stimulate a high level of collective learning. read more »