I was excited to attend my first Creating Space at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore Maryland earlier this month. I was especially looking forward to meeting folks that make up our learning community and to take my understanding about leadership to the next level. The theme of this year’s Creating Space was breaking new ground as leadership development practitioners, evaluators, researchers and community organizers gathered to discuss what this means for social innovation.

But how do we strengthen ourselves in order to create change and break new ground? At Creating Space we learned the leadership development field is at a point of transition; that old leadership development frameworks are shattering, and that we are beginning to recognize and implement new community-led leadership models.

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A while ago, I wrote an article introducing the design thinking methodology and its core elements.  I have continued to explore this methodology since then and have found it to be extremely relevant to our work in leadership development.  For instance, at our latest Creating Space meeting, one of our Design Team participants – Kenny Bailey, who is an expert on design thinking for social innovation  – had an idea about the design for the 3rd day of the convening.  He suggested that we move the group to an action oriented exercise and invite them to collaborate with teams to design solutions for a particular leadership problem, such as getting those who have not traditionally been at the table to participate in discussions about leadership.  The group came up with some pretty innovative ideas and the room felt energized and ready to take action.   As I continue to explore design thinking I would like to share some of my learnings with the community.

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LLC Member Spotlight: Stacy Kono, Rockwood Leadership Institute

We are excited this month to be highlighting our partnership work with Rockwood Leadership and in particular with Stacy Kono who is Rockwood's Fellowship Director. We have had a long standing relationship with Rockwood and more recently converged more through our work.  Through our partnership with Social Policy Research Associates, LLC had the opportunity to help evaluate the impact of the leadership development component of the Community Leadership Project.  Rockwood, one of the leadership providers for CLP ran leadership programs for people of color.  I was moved to sit in a circle with Stacy and a couple of Rockwood participants as they talked about the power of the experience.  One woman who talked about doing work in a community where tritip, football and Jesus are the background went on to say, “To have a space in beautiful place to talk about feelings was beautiful.  I am hurt and need to heal and want to heal others.  It was a gift.”  We are huge fans of Rockwood and all of the folks over there and are happy to have the opportunity to appreciate Stacy.

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Promoting Leadership Within Our Organizations is a Big Win!  Why aren’t more people doing it?

Yay!  The board whole heartedly endorsed Natalia to be the new Managing Director for the Leadership Learning Community on May 8th.  Because getting board buy in is important, I think it’s worth explaining why this was a seamless “no brainer”.  Board members have been able to experience firsthand the improvements that Natalia has brought to LLC in her role as Marketing/Communications Director.  For example, Natalia has consistently (and persistently) professionalized LLC’s communications internally and externally.  You can thank her for our excellent monthly webinar series and robust monthly newsletter.  Having good ideas and resources won’t amount to much unless you can get them in front of people and Natalia definitely has; we have gone from a community of 800 people to 3,500 under Natalia’s leadership.  She also took the lead in an operations audit that introduced many new project management tools to LLC; time tracking tools, capacity projection tools, budget development tools, timeline tools and….she likes this stuff!

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