Deborah Meehan's blog

I have been involved in conversations lately about stipends and I would love to hear about your experience and perspectives.  A number of leadership programs grapple with the issue of stipends.  This is important if we want to provide equitable access to leadership development opportunities.  Not everyone has the same resources available to cover childcare costs, gas, or missed time from work that might not be compensated.  Some community programs are providing stipends to participants to remove the financial limitations to participation.  Not only community based programs are thinking about this. One model I am familiar with provided compensation for an individual’s lost work time to their institution or to the individual if they were consultants.

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A few months ago we asked you to share ideas about how to support communities who are  taking action and producing solutions to the problems they care about most.  Now we're sharing some of your ideas, as well as some of our own findings through a community leadership project for the Bush Foundation.  In this article we share key elements of community change and important capacities being cultivated by community leadership programs.

Elements of Community Change

Neighborhoods and communities all across the country are struggling economically; many communities do not have jobs, access to healthy foods, healthy places to live, clean air, parks, quality education, or the social and financial capital that enable families and children to grow up educated, healthy, and secure.  And yet there are hundreds of ways in which groups of citizens are working together to improve their communities. They are organizing youth, creating community gardens, addressing racial tensions and conflict, and seeking more effective ways to use scarce resources. We are learning from these stories about the kinds of support that enliven community spirit, encourage dialogue and catalyze action.  The elements are drawn from a quick scan and aggregation of a number of different resources that have been produced around building community capacity.  These elements are organized into different categories but are present in much of the research and evaluation findings. read more »

The MN Leadership Learning Circle recently met to discuss the topic of trust building and one thing was perfectly clear: we were only scratching the surface of a very complex topic. We had set aside two hours to share food and dive into it.  As a teaser, here is a sampler of 5 provocative questions that were added to the mix by a very engaged group of 25 leadership development program staff, funders and consultants.  read more »

• Instead of asking how to build trust in others should we be asking what we need to do to be trustworthy?
• What is the cost of a lack of trust in our organizations?
• How do you build trust in online communities?
• Are we assuming that it is a good thing to trust people?
• How do we address power dynamics in building trust?

As you read this article I can imagine the collective groan that will reverberate through our community.  I know this because there have been nothing but heavy hearts and long faces here over the news that Bella is leaving us, even though we are happy that she is going to an exciting new position.  The Tides Center made Bella, ‘an offer she couldn’t refuse’.  What a lot of people in our community may not realize is that many of us here at LLC (not unlike many nonprofits today) have been working on reduced salaries for the past couple of years as the recession took a big bite out of grant funding streams.  We set a goal of keeping our team intact and each individual made decisions about the cuts we could absorb to make this possible.  These sacrifices have continued longer than we had hoped. We are all happy that Bella will be better compensated for her work, though it’s really not possible to put a monetary value on the heart and love that Bella brings to her work.

Bella will be in Client Services at Tides, our fiscal sponsor.  They of course had first-hand experience with the quality of care and warmth that Bella brings to all of her interactions.  If you have ever called LLC, you know what I am talking about.  Bella is all heart and a legendary part of LLC’s history.  Every year when we conduct our team reviews, we unanimously appreciate the way the Bella embodies the values of LLC.  In the past 5 years, we have written about leadership as a relational process, one that requires authenticity, trust, compassion and love.  Bella models and inspires all of this and with just enough of that New York accent to keep it real. As our Administrative Director, Bella has been the task master who keeps us on track and helps all to be our best accountable selves.  Bella has been with LLC since the beginning and is a big part of who we are today. We are all sad (yes, Bella too) and we will miss her beyond words.  We may have to publish her new number at Tides so we can all get our Bella fix.  We know that many of you will want to write to Bella with your well wishes and good byes so please feel free to send her an email at bella@leadershiplearning.org.

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A couple of weeks ago I was having coffee with a friend from the Netherlands when he asked the big fat looming question, “How am I changed or what have I learned from cancer.”   I suppressed an inward sigh thinking instantly of the books I received after my diagnosis about people who became gifted poets or gave the renowned “last lecture.”  I have no new artistic talents to report, damn! I have, however, been thinking about what I have learned, and yes of course, what I have learned about leadership.  So this month I thought I would write about two things I am enthusiastic about, leadership and me.  Before going any further, for anyone who does not know, let me reassure you that I have been cancer free for 3 years with an excellent prognosis!

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The Bush Foundation recently sponsored a learning community meeting of leadership development investors and practitioners in Minnesota, where I had the opportunity to learn about a very interesting community leadership development approach by the Initiative Foundation called the Healthy Community Partnership (HCP) program. Intrigued about the HCP program, I conducted a follow-up interview with Dan Frank, Program Manager for Community Development at the Initiative Foundation, so that we could share their innovative work with all of you. read more »

When developing a leadership program one of the most important decisions to make is who to recruit to the program.  Yet too many are tempted  to first rush into program design.  Deciding who to serve requires a thorough understanding of the problem being addressed, what has limited progress on the problem to date, how work with a specific target population will make a difference, and what kind of support the participants will need to produce the results you are hoping to achieve.  This may seem like common sense but it can be far more complex than we realize.  To demonstrate this complexity we want to share two examples: one that defies conventional wisdom about who can mobilize resources; the second, an example showing how different programs working on the same problem have different ideas about who they need to recruit.

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I had the opportunity to attend the ILA Conference in London last month. In fact, I have attended every ILA conference for the past 10 years with one exception … and I had a doctor’s note.  This year, the closing keynote by Keith Grint, a prolific leadership scholar from the UK, gave me an interesting new frame on leadership. Over the past two years LLC has been writing quite a bit about the need to expand our understanding of leadership as a collective process.  People rightfully remind us that the catalyst and individual role is essential and of course we agree. It's really one of those both/and situations where we need committed individuals, and we need them to connect their efforts with others to achieve more together than any one person, no matter how fabulous, could achieve alone.  Keith’s framework on wicked problems helped to provide more context to the “why” and “when” of collective leadership and pull together some of our thinking about innovation and systemic change.  

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Who best to introduce Georgia Sorenson for our Member Spotlight, but Deborah Meehan who shares some of her reflections about how LLC took shape over a cup of coffee and a long lasting partnership born . . . .

LLC’s Genesis:  A cup of coffee, napkin scribbles and a good friend

Fifteen years ago I met up with someone I barely knew for one of those pivotal conversations.  I had been meeting with leadership programs around the country in the course of doing alumni organizing for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and could not help but notice that the staff of different leadership programs were dealing with many of the same issues and with very few opportunities to talk to or learn from each other.  I found myself wondering if there would be value in creating a community of learning and practice for people doing leadership development work.  I had never started an organization so I reached out to Georgia Sorenson who was the founder of the Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland.  Even though I had only met Georgia once, she graciously agreed to meet for coffee in downtown DC.  Georgia became an enthusiastic champion of the idea.  She offered more than support though.  She grabbed a napkin and began sketching out a budget and offered staff and facilities resources for our first Creating Space gathering, the event that launched the Leadership Learning Community.   Georgia rolled up her sleeves and served on the LLC board stewarding the LLC vision and growing our community.  It’s a pleasure to have this opportunity to acknowledge and appreciate Georgia as a valued founding partner, dear friend, invaluable member of this community and contributor to the leadership development field.             

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In our last newsletter article we initiated a conversation about community change and the role of leadership.  Since then we have been reading a number of interesting evaluation findings and articles on this question that were produced by programs in the Leadership Learning Community.  We are hoping to engage a much broader group in synthesizing what we are learning from these different experiences.  We have created a wiki where we are sharing some of the resources we have been reading and our early attempt to lift up some lessons about community leadership.  We hope you will add resources, examples and your experience to collectively develop our understanding about how to support communities in ways that help them to organize themselves and mobilize their resources to effective action. Below are some of the ingredients of community leadership and action that keep coming up and may be the beginning of the ‘secret sauce’ for effective community action.

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