Claire Reinelt's blog

In March 2007, the Leadership Learning community (LLC) held a Health Leadership Learning Circle retreat near Napa, California. The retreat gathered 30 health leadership development funders, practitioners, and evaluators to share resources, tools, information and successful approaches to supporting, developing and connecting health leadership. Ginny Oehler and Tracy Patterson were both at the retreat. read more »

Inclusive, networked, and collective approaches to leadership are vital for the development of the social sector, for its power to influence public will and public policy, and for the personal survival of leaders in the sector.

At present, the social sector leadership system privileges the exercise of leadership within organizations. An assumption exists that organizations are the most efficient and accountable way to deliver services and advocate for change. read more »

Expanding LLC's reach and networks

LLC staff wants to thank everyone who participated in our first Leadership for a New Era (LNE) webinar during which we introduced and invited peers to join with the Leadership Learning Community to shape and create the LNE initiative.  (A copy of our webinar slides are attached below.) Our outreach efforts included personal contact, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Linked In.  We significantly extended our network with these outreach efforts and attracted people committed to transforming the leadership culture in a number of different arenas, including social justice, service, climate change, and internationally. read more »

The landscape for collaboration is changing. As leaders increasingly participate in multiple and diverse networks, opportunities for connections and collaborations abound. Often the word collaboration sounds good in theory, but our past experiences lead us to believe that this is much harder in practice. With the constrained resources and time pressures we all face, collaboration may appear as one more thing we can’t afford to do. Who can take the time to collaborate? LLC, through experimentation with new ways of collaborating, has found that the benefits of collaboration can be more easily realized than you think. read more »

We would like to extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to the Creating Space IX participants for taking the time and completing the follow up survey and sharing your thoughts, experiences, learning, suggestions and comments. Over 38% of you responded! Your survey responses have provided us with a rich opportunity to learn about what worked, what didn’t work, and what we could have done better. read more »

Posted on behalf of Sally Leiderman

The Center for Assessment and Policy Development was supported by a grant from the Leadership Learning Community Seed Fund to survey leadership programs to learn how they are addressing issues of white privilege, structural racism and diversity in the context of their leadership programs. The survey is part of a larger project in which CAPD is partnering with MP Associates and World Trust Educational Services to create tools and guidance that can be embedded in a wide range of leadership programs to take up these issues. As we found out at Creating Space recently – even with our best intentions – many of us lack the skills, confidence and fortitude to deal straight on with these issues – even when we think that is a strategy that might be helpful.  Many of us also wonder about how to be strategic about these issues – when to raise them, whether to raise them – whether attention to community, relationships, love and courage – can be “color-blind” or need to be racialized. My take-away from what occurred at Creating Space is that we are going to need multiple strategies, multiple entry points and a whole lot of experimentation and persistence on leading for social justice.  read more »

In a recent consulting opportunity with the United Way of Greater Toronto, I worked with Amanuel Melles, the Director of Organizational Capacity Building to develop a Framework for Leadership Investment and Evaluation. This framework, adapted from a GEO leadership framework, is designed to help funders clarify the purpose for their investments in leadership and to link those purposes to specific programs, and sample activities (The GEO framework is available in Investing in Leadership, vol. 1). Amanuel thought this framework could be useful for assisting the United Way and other leadership funders in Canada to become more intentional about where they are currently investing resources, where there are gaps in investment, and how they might work together to maximize the impact of their resources. read more »

Advice from Donella Meadows on how to lead in a world of systems from her book Thinking in Systems: A Primer 1. Get the beat of the system 2. Expose your mental models to the light of day 3. Use language with care and enrich it with systems concepts 4. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable 5. Make feedback policies for feedback systems 6. Go for the good of the whole 7. Listen to the wisdom of the system 8. Locate responsibility in the system 9. Stay humble – stay a learner 10. Celebrate complexity 11. Expand time horizons 12. Defy the disciplines 13. Expand the boundary of caring 14. Don’t erode the goal of goodness This is good advice for those of us who fund, run, and evaluate leadership efforts that seek systems level or social change outcomes. read more »

LLC hosted a webinar on Leadership, Race and White Privilege with Sally Leiderman, President of CAPD. Sally has been a long-time member of LLC and an active participant in the Evaluation Circle. She received an LLC seed grant to support her work to disseminate share and disseminate a curriculum on white privilege that can be adapted and used in leadership development programs. During the webinar Sally presented findings from a survey of 123 leadership development funders, practitioners, and evaluators. With one program in mind, each survey respondent had answered questions about how their program addressed issues of diversity, structural racism, and white privilege. The powerpoint presentation is available below. Highlights from the conversation are available here. We invite you to continue this conversation at Creating Space, May 20-22 and as part of our Collaborative Learning Initiative. read more »

LLC hosted a learning lab on learning communities with learning circle partners and others who facilitate learning communities. I had two experiences that enabled me to go deeper with my understanding about how to open up transformative learning and how to manifest the kind of change we desire in the world in our learning community process. A group of eight people used Emergent Learning Mapping to explore the question, "How do we create conditions that open up transformative learning?" We told our own stories of transformative learning and identified insights from our own experiences that we shared with each other. We then came up with hypotheses that we could test in future opportunities we have to facilitate a learning community experience. The learning from the session is captured here. read more »