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If our leadership work is wildly successful, who will be better off and how will we know?
 

Most of us working in the leadership field are committed to having some bold and worthwhile impact in the lives of others. Based on a sampling of leadership programs in the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) directory, if just 3 leadership programs were wildly successful, we would see children entering school ready to learn, improved social and economic well-being of the Latino community, and a reduction of AIDS in a large metro area. These are high stakes. There is a lot riding on the success of leadership programs. read more »

The August Member Spotlight shines bright on an invaluable member of the community and co-chair of the LLC Board of Directors, Eugene Eric Kim. Since joining the board three years ago, Eugene has been a generous, thoughtful, creative and innovative learning partner. As a champion of collaborative tools, he has ushered us toward applying collaborative technologies in all aspects of our work. It’s safe to say, we are now wiki-maniacs. Eugene is a collaborative partner on the Leadership and Networks collaborative research project, Leadership for a New Era (LNE), that seeks to promote leadership that is more inclusive, networked and collective. Eugene as a member of the LNE advisory board Eugene has pushed to ‘walk our talk’ and operate in ways that are inclusive, networked and collective. Eugene’s unfaltering spirit of collaboration aligns with the vision of the Leadership Learning Community. Eugene often challenges us to think “differently,” deepening and enriching the conversation. read more »

•      "Social Analytics Meet Community Engagement" 
        Author:  Allison Fine                                                                    
        Date:  July 26,2010
        Source:  A. Fine Blog
        URL:  http://bit.ly/cZ51Dy 

Allison Fine looks at how all the social media activity related to social causes translates into the actual on-the-ground activity necessary for social change.  She explores the question:  “What, if anything, does all of the clicking, blogging, and “friending” add up to in the end?”.  This topic, the one of how to both translate online exchanges into offline actions and measure the results (the connection between online activity and veritable social change), engenders a discussion, which, as Fine describes is in its “infancy.”   read more »

Author: Gibrán Rivera, Interaction Institute for Social Change

Original Post: http://interactioninstitute.org/blog/2010/08/02/transcend-organizational-constraints/

This is a very exciting time for those of us who are working to apply the logic of networks to the work of social change. Our ideas are gaining traction as more and more experiments start to point towards success. Life online, the viral nature of meaningful stories and our human desire for deeper connection all serve to confirm our intuitive understanding of life in a network. However, as we step into this paradigm shift, as we start to approve of these ideas, we still have to contend with the constraints of the organizational and funding structures within which we currently work.

A few years ago, my hardest challenge was in persuading my peers in this work that networks made more sense than the more familiar organizational and coalitional structures with which we were working. Today more and more people “get” that it’s about networks, but we have not figured out how to arrange our work together so that we can more easily step into this paradigm. read more »