Where the Rubber Meets the Road

By: Deborah Meehan

There is more to our consulting services  than may meet the eye.  It’s not just about money, or as we like to say, diversifying our revenue streams; although it been a very helpful source of income during the past couple of years when grant funding was more restricted. 
 

It may help to give a little history to LLC’s consulting services.  When we were first approached to take on a larger evaluation project it occurred to us that we had the opportunity to bring consultants together on projects who as potential competitors most likely had little collegial opportunity to share and develop tools and protocols together.  We loved that consulting provided a platform for increased collegial learning among consultants, and also for sharing knowledge and insights generated through the project with our community through our website and blog.
 

Fast forward to 2009 when the LLC team (staff and board), had an important, and timely, discussion that brought a whole new lens to our consulting work.  As part of the Leadership for a New Era  work we became aware of the need for new models and practical applications of leadership approaches that are more inclusive, networked and collective.  We began to appreciate our consulting services work as an applied research opportunity.  Since this time we have sought out consulting projects that would test our thinking and deepen the leadership field’s understanding of what it looks like to bring a race conscious lens to the work or design a network centric leadership program or use social network analysis to catalyze alumni networks.

We are learning a lot through our new applied research strategy and we have had really enjoyed tapping into the diverse talents of community members as we learn together.  Our community of leadership funders, program staff and consultants is LLC's greatest asset for LLC and we are happy to be channeling this resource in ways that benefit the field through our consulting services.  We will continue to share lessons from these projects because we believe that they have learning value not just for participants but for our collective efforts to shift the current leadership paradigm and promote high impact inclusive, networked and collective leadership development strategies.