Claire Reinelt's blog

I have been honored over the past seven years to be part of the Leadership Learning Community’s leadership team, and for the past twelve years to have helped nurture the LLC community, particularly the Evaluation Learning Circle, and the Boston Learning Circle. Beginning February 1st, I will be taking a five month sabbatical and transitioning my role from being on staff at LLC to the role of senior affiliate consultant. Rick (my husband) and I will be living in Oslo, and traveling to London, Copenhagen, and Berlin. I look forward to having time to step back and reflect on twelve years of learning about leadership and social change, writing and continuing to consult on a smaller number of projects while I’m gone and when I return at the end of June.

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I recently participated in a “think tank” for researchers and evaluators that have been meeting to harvest their learning from community leadership development research and evaluations; and share it with the community leadership development field. The “think tank” met this week to outline a white paper on lessons learned. Topics included in the white paper include focusing on: (1)  purpose and results of leadership development; (2) who is recruited to participate; (3) how the program is designed and delivered; (4) the content of the program; (5) how impact is evaluated; and (6) future research questions. We will share this white paper when it comes out.  In the meantime, the “think tank” will present its lessons learned and examples of work in an upcoming LLC webinar in October.  Stay tuned to the LLC webinar page for the announcement of dates.

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The Community Leadership Project  is a three year investment strategy by Packard, Hewlett, and Irvine foundations to strengthen the organizational and leadership capacities of small organizations serving low-income people and communities of color in the San Joaquin Valley, the Central Coast and the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Twenty-seven (27) intermediaries were funded to provide core financial and tailored support to small to mid-size nonprofits to build five capacities:  adaptive, leadership, operational/management, programmatic, and community/collaborative.  Ten intermediaries were funded under the leadership strategy.  
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I was inspired to write this blogpost because I have been intrigued by the relationship between online activism and activism in the streets since being asked by a client how to understand the connection between the two. When does online activism move to the streets? What are the practices and actions that people take online to build momentum and prepare themselves? How do online and in the streets activists work together to create a movement for change?
 

I’ve been reading the memoir of Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian architect of the Facebook revolution.  In his memoir, Revolution 2.0:  The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power, Ghonim provides an intimate look into his mindset and actions in the early days of Internet activism to mobilize opposition to the Egyptian police state.  His telling of how Egyptian youth used the Internet to take a stand and move into the streets is an absolutely riveting story. 

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LLC MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

We are happy to have this opportunity to profile the work of a valued colleague and community member.  We came into contact with Donna first through our evaluation work and then through meetings at the Leadership Development Network for Public Health Programs.  We leveraged Donna’s public health background as part of a team we put together for a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project to understand influence in state and local public health Action Networks across North Carolina.  Since that time, we have invited Donna to share her action learning model in one of our Leadership for a New Era webinars.  We believe that action learning is a crucial component of collective leadership and we appreciate her contributions to those who are looking for more inclusive, networked and collective leadership models and tools.

Donna Dinkin is a global public health leadership development/evaluation consultant and action learning coach. Her two teen boys are quick to point out that her long title actually means that she doesn’t have a ‘real’ job. She doesn’t argue this point. She tells them they are correct. She doesn’t have a ‘job’; she has is a meaningful career. She is living her dream.

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I had the pleasure of being a catalyst host for a conversation on evaluating community leadership and community change with Becky Kroll and Diane Morehouse at Leadership Chautauqua. They have worked extensively in hard-to-reach communities evaluating leadership and community transformation through their work with Horizons, a community leadership initiative to reduce poverty in the small towns of the Northwestern United States.  Here is a short list of resources we created on evaluating community leadership and community change for our session on Changing Expectations:  Targeting and Measuring Impact on Community Change.

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In the summer 2012 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Marianne Hughes and Didi Goldenhar have written a case study on the Barr Fellows Network, entitled Networking a City.  It describes a seven year investment in seasoned nonprofit executive directors to reinvigorate their leadership and create environments for them to form authentic relationships with each other that spur innovation and transform Boston’s social sector to become more highly collaborative and mission-driven.  The assumption is that if diverse leaders in the social sector form authentic, trusting relationships, then they will find creative, innovative ways to tap their collective assets for greater social benefit.   read more »

I met Kenny Bailey through a Network TA Providers group that was convened in Boston by the Barr Foundation. A group of 20+ providers were given the opportunity to work in teams  on a joint project to strengthen the network leadership capacity of a community-based networks.  Kenny and I worked on supporting a youth service network in one of Boston’s neighborhoods. We became familiar with each other’s work and interests through this action learning project. The project ended after several months, but we knew each other enough to that I turned to Kenny when we were called upon to design an innovation lab for a client.

Kenny and his partner, Lori Lobenstine became our partners for the Boston Innovation Lab. I was excited to work with Kenny and Lori to co-design a process for coming up with innovative approaches to find ways to support and catalyze 1000s of leaders to transform their communities so that children everywhere grow up healthy and whole.  Their ability to create spaces to play with new ideas, and encourage experimentation and learning was marvelous and refreshing.  Here’s how one person described the experience.

What we experienced today shifted the conversation about leadership, and it shifted the entry point. Not how do we as individuals develop, but instead it was how do we come together to solve these real social issues, and what space and what process can we create to engage 1000s of people in solving these problems. That is a very different approach to leadership development. It’s not about “I want to be a better leader”, but I want to be a part of this creative process; that becomes the new standard for leadership. We’ve known that shared leadership is important, but we don’t really know how to do it. Today’s examples felt like they were moving in that direction. read more »