Blog

LLC has been a completely remote organization for several years, so the move to social distancing, work from home practices to slow the spread of COVID-19 hasn’t changed the mechanics of how we work, but it has most certainly changed the feel of our work. We are all concerned about the welfare of our families, friends, and communities. We contemplate the contributions our work can have in these times, and the role of leadership during a crisis like this one.

Reflecting on the impact of COVID-19 has made me re-connect with LLC’s mission, underscoring why equity-centered, networked, and collective leadership working to advance justice really matters. It has illuminated the need for connection and collaboration, care and compassion, reflected in the thoughtfulness of many in our communities who are working hard to support others. This crisis has further exposed the huge number of people in our country, and in the world, who have been marginalized, the gaps in our safety nets, and in too many cases, weaknesses in our leadership.

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How can we support those who are leading in wildly different and difficult times?

The need for leadership is more pressing than ever in the current COVID-19 pandemic and there have been some interesting conversations about the kind of leadership needed...and lets keep those ideas coming, but what about the “How? How can we provide leadership support virtually as we practice social distancing. Luckily, a number of leadership practitioners have been experimenting with virtual learning for a while and some folks have been experimenting with virtual communities of practice and networks as vehicles for supporting and developing leadership. No doubt, some of you have already come up with innovations in the past week. Let’s bring all of our experiences together, the good and the bad, so that we learn more quickly together about how to best support those who are leading in wildly different and difficult times. 

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LLC is happy to welcome Tamitha Walker McKinnis to the team as our new Senior Project Manager.  Joining us from St Louis, Missouri, Tamitha brings with her a wealth of knowledge from her impressive and varied career path as a trainer and facilitator, grantmaker, researcher and most recently, as a consultant. 

In addition to the professional skills she will add to LLC, we are also excited to note the great values alignment between LLC and Tamitha.  When asked about what values are most important to her, Tamitha quickly listed “transparency, collaboration, diversity, trust, shared power and leadership, and centering equity.”  These are values that live at the heart of LLC. It appears this connection is also clear to Tamitha who said, “I knew I was in the right place, with the right set of folks when the first conversation I entered on my first day prompted me to respond to questions about shifting the dominant narrative and building power.”  

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Pondering Liberatory Leadership Development

By Ericka Stallings

Throughout the Creating Space 2019/2020 multi-region conversation series, we’ve explored what it would take for our Leadership Development work to center equity and shift power for justice. In each conversation, at some point, we explored what a liberatory future could look like, and how our work fighting for equity and justice could help us make this future real. To further dig into these questions, the Bay Area convening Co-Facilitator, Patrick Brown, explicitly asked a panel of Catalyst Speakers to explain how they think about liberation, specifically how they distinguish between equity and liberation (For more on this conversation see Deborah’s blog entry here).

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