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Announcing 2012 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellowship Opportunity

OSI-Baltimore invites you to send in your applications!

OSI-Baltimore is now accepting applications for the 2012 class of Baltimore Community Fellows!
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Tapping into the Wisdom of Your Community: How We Launched the Nonprofit Leadership Webinar Series

Last year during the Leadership Learning Community board meeting we experimented with the idea of a ‘networked board’.  We wondered, “How might governing in a more networked way help us to fulfill our mission of promoting leadership approaches that are more networked and collective?” And to test the idea in real time we invited several members of the LLC community, including Renato Almanzor from LeaderSpring, Beth Kanter (author of the Networked Nonprofit), and Kathy Reich from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to join the conversation during the board meeting.  The discussion was inspiring as we started to imagine what it would be like to encourage a higher level of engagement from our community.  One of the key take-aways for me was the fact that there is an incredible wealth of information in our community, and that asking people to share can go a long way.  With this in mind, we started to think of initiatives that would greatly benefit our community and that would be feasible to implement based on the resources that we had.  And that is when the LLC Nonprofit Leadership Webinar Series was created.

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Upcoming Webinar: Action Learning - Maximizing its Use in Community-Based Leadership Development Programs

Presenter:  Donna R. Dinkin, DrPH, MPH

Date:  Monday, April 23rd 11:00AM-12:00 Noon PDT (2:00P-3:00PM EDT)

This webinar is for individuals who are interested in maximizing the use of action learning as a component of a formal leadership development program. Specifically, the session will define ‘action-learning’, will highlight how this methodology is being used in public health leadership development programs and will briefly describe strategies and challenges for coaches of community-based action-learning teams.

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A New Take on Leadership Development

The Bush Foundation recently sponsored a learning community meeting of leadership development investors and practitioners in Minnesota, where I had the opportunity to learn about a very interesting read more »

Member Spotlight: Dianne Yamashiro-Omi

 

Dianne Yamashiro-Omi, Senior Program Officer at The California Endowment, is a big picture thinker.  We were drawn to her many years ago when she began talking about boundary-crossing leadership.  We felt very lucky to be a partner in this work, running a learning circle for her grantees so that we could all learn more about how to support leaders who can build bridges across boundaries. One divide that can be tricky is the one between funder and grantee, but Dianne brings a keen awareness of power dynamics. She frequently asked how her presence might alter a frank conversation and offered to attend (or even not attend) meetings to support candid learning. Dianne has been an invaluable learning partner asking the kind of tough questions we love about racial justice and the kind of leadership it would really take to tackle inequities in the health of Californians.  read more »

How Strategic is your Recruitment?

When developing a leadership program one of the most important decisions to make is who to recruit to the program.  Yet too many are tempted  to first rush into program design.  Deciding who to serve requires a thorough understanding of the problem being addressed, what has limited progress on the problem to date, how work with a specific target population will make a difference, and what kind of support the participants will need to produce the results you are hoping to achieve.  This may seem like common sense but it can be far more complex than we realize.  To demonstrate this complexity we want to share two examples: one that defies conventional wisdom about who can mobilize resources; the second, an example showing how different programs working on the same problem have different ideas about who they need to recruit.

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Guest Blog Post by Curtis Ogden: If You Till It, They Will Come: Nurturing Collective Leadership Webinar

This article was originally posted on Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) (the webinar powerpoint is available here)

Picking up from Gibran’s post yesterday and continuing in the vein of follow-up to our LLC webinar on collective leadership, I want to respond to some of the questions we did not have a chance to answer or answer fully from participants, including requests for examples of collective leadership in action and inquiries about blocks and how to work through or overcome them.

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Applying Social Network Analysis to Online Communications Networks

RWJF Blog Influencer Map.jpg

By Claire Reinelt, Natalia Castaneda

 

Looking to increase your reach and influence in the social media space? Social Network Analysis (SNA), a research methodology that focuses on “mapping and measuring relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities,” (Orgnet.com) may be the answer. We recently partnered with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to explore how to effectively apply social network analysis to public health online communications strategies, how communications networks operate in Twitter and the blogosphere, and how to identify strategic and influential connections that can be nurtured over time to extend the reach of public health messaging. This was an innovative project that produced detailed and insightful information about how to use SNA to strategize communications campaigns, and we wanted to share some of these insights with the community – including specific recommendations for identifying key messages, influencers, and engagement strategies.

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Nonprofit Leadership News Brief: January 2012

On Collective Leadership... read more »

 
  • Curtis Ogden highlights four key concepts underlying the roots of the Interaction Institute's approach to collective leadership: epistemology, cosmology, ontology, technology.  Epistemology is that it’s not just about what we know, but how we know it – intuitively, intellectually, analytically. Cosmology is looking to the complex living systems and networks as the complicated reality we all live in. Ontology is the idea that each of us is evolving and capable of both learning and unlearning. Finally, technology/methodology is the idea of looking to the practices that create the best conditions for collective leadership. 
  • Stowe Boyd discusses concepts from a Sara Horowitz’s talk on mutualism and creates a “mutualist manifesto”.  At the heart of the manifesto is finding common cause and growing mutual associations locally and globally, associations such as coops, unions, and policy organizations. Boyd thinks that associations supporting one another, governance by members, seeking benefits not profits, and cooperating in resource allocation will all make great headway towards directing change in a systemically chaotic world.

Upcoming Webinar: Confessions of a Network Strategist: Lessons Learned from the 1st Year of Education Pioneers' Network Strategy

Presenter: Jason Weeby, Education Pioneers

Date: Wednesday, March 14 11:00AM-12:00 Noon PDT (2:00PM-3:00PM EDT)

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