Claire Reinelt's blog

Peggy Holman shared some insightful reflections as a catalyst at OccupyCafe, a virtual world cafe space envisioning the future of the Occupy movement (check out her powerpoint slides on the vital conversations page).  She talked about the pattern of how change happens and she reflected on what leadership looks like in a movement for change.

All change starts with the disruption of a social system -- a disruption from coherence -- where things worked the way we thought they should, according to assumptions, principles and rules we all knew and understood.    read more »

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I spent four hours with people from many walks of life at the Occupy Boston Summit in the heart of Chinatown about 15 minutes from Dewey Square, the site of Occupy Boston.  Over three hundred people were in a school cafeteria, an overflow room, and on livestreaming to have a conversation for four hours about where the “occupy” movement in Boston goes from here.  

Every two years, experienced, values-driven nonprofit executive directors leading organizations in Boston, focused on education, the environment, the arts, housing, human services and youth, are nominated and selected as Barr Fellows. The fellowship is a prize that comes with a three month sabbatical, two retreats per year and an opportunity to engage in activities with the Barr Fellows Network. It is a prize for people who have devoted their lives to social change, and who are skillful organizational leaders filled with passion and purpose. Since 2005, 48 nonprofit leaders have received the Fellowship award; over 60% are leaders of color.

The overarching vision for the Barr Fellows Program is a thriving nonprofit sector with diverse, strong, and connected leadership that is having a positive impact on the quality of civic life in Boston. One goal is to nurture strong connections among a diverse group of leaders who work in different neighborhoods and on different issues so that they can create authentic, honest, and accountable relationships with one another. read more »

The nonprofit sector has been hard hit by the economic recession. Fewer resources are available to meet more and more pressing needs. Some states and communities are coming together to find ways to more efficiently and effectively use the available resources for community benefit. One example is the Nonprofit Sector Viability Collaboration in Maine. The Collaboration is composed of funders, capacity-building organizations and consultants who have come together to find more efficient and effective ways to strengthen the viability of the nonprofit sector in Maine.

Several factors have contributed to the Collaboration’s success. read more »

In a recent LLC Funders and Evaluation Circle meeting on Evidence-Based Practice and Leadership Development, we explored whether forming and testing hypotheses about leadership and leadership development might lead to stronger evidence about what works.  We wondered whether we could be more strategic about where we invest in leadership by testing our assumptions, and using more  rigorous and relevant measurement techniques and evaluation tools to support our learning. read more »

I have been thinking a lot lately about evidence-based practice. We have been doing research for the Annie E. Casey Foundation on how to apply evidence-based methodologies to our assessment of leadership efforts to more clearly focus on bringing about a change in results (e.g., high student achievement in schools that serve low-income communities and communities of color). read more »

I’ve been inspired reading the Networked Nonprofit to reflect on the challenges facing the nonprofit sector and the crisis of leadership. The rise of the professional nonprofit organization has produced enormous social benefit over the past 40 years, yet the current leadership culture in many nonprofit organizations is neither viable nor desirable. Many nonprofit leaders are simply burned out from the constant pressure to raise money for their organizations and deliver more services on fewer and fewer dollars. The current system for funding and managing work that produces social benefit is exhausting and highly inefficient. Organizational leaders are isolated from one another, and have few pathways for more collective leadership. What will it take to change this leadership system?

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Evidence-based practice (EBP) is commonly used to inform practice decisions in the fields of medicine, nursing, social work, child welfare, and criminal justice.

These fields have established standards of practice that guide decision-making about what treatments and protocols to use with individual patients, clients, and offenders to ensure the highest possible accountability for producing good results.

How is evidence-based practice being used in the field of leadership development?  read more »

By Claire Reinelt

(Article originally posted on Stanford Social Innovation Review Opinion Blog)

Whether we seek to eliminate health disparities or prepare all children to enter school ready to learn, we do not have the leadership we need.  The heroic model of leadership blinds us to the fact that untapped leadership potential exists everywhere.  The dominant leadership model assumes that training individuals will better prepare them to lead strong organizations; and in turn strong organizations will produce better community-level results, but this model falls well short. Reaching the scale and scope of leadership needed to address complex issues requires new approaches to leadership development. Our focus should be on finding, cultivating, and connecting leadership everywhere it exists; across all generations, races, communities, and organizational levels. To activate this untapped leadership potential, leadership thinking and practice need to shift in three fundamental directions: read more »

Network leadership, unlike conventional leadership approaches, is collective, distributed, bottom-up, facilitative and emergent. The individual model of leadership historically associated with strong organizations is more, directive, top-down, and transactional. As we expand our leadership mindset to understand leadership as a collective process, more people are questioning the leadership assumptions that are embedded in traditional organizational structures and processes. While the Leadership and Networks publication will contrast network and organizational leadership as a useful way of highlighting new models of leadership emerging in a connected environment, we believe that these distinctions will become less significant as organizations and communities adopt leadership approaches that are more relational and collective.

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