Natalia Castaneda's blog

By Deborah Meehan and Natalia Castaneda

First, a big “thank you!” to all of you who took time to complete a survey to help us learn more about our community.  We received 181 responses and wanted to share some of the key insights and provocative questions that your responses helped to surface.

Many of you who responded are relatively new to LLC and have connected to us primarily through our webinars and the resources available on our website.  At LLC we have been talking about the changing nature of the relationship we have with our community. We believe there are several factors contributing to this change.  After bringing on a fabulous marketing director, our reach has expanded tremendously.  In the past two years the number of people subscribing to our newsletter, which is our primary channel for communication, has increased from 1,000 to nearly 3,000.  Attracting a much larger group of people who are more broadly distributed around the US, and the globe for that matter, has transformed the way we connect from what had been face-to-face learning events to a more virtual exchange of ideas and resources. As the economy has taken a toll on travel budgets for leadership program staff and made it more difficult for us to raise funds for convenings, we have not been able to hold our national meeting Creating Space for the past couple of years.

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Last year during the Leadership Learning Community board meeting we experimented with the idea of a ‘networked board’.  We wondered, “How might governing in a more networked way help us to fulfill our mission of promoting leadership approaches that are more networked and collective?” And to test the idea in real time we invited several members of the LLC community, including Renato Almanzor from LeaderSpring, Beth Kanter (author of the Networked Nonprofit), and Kathy Reich from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to join the conversation during the board meeting.  The discussion was inspiring as we started to imagine what it would be like to encourage a higher level of engagement from our community.  One of the key take-aways for me was the fact that there is an incredible wealth of information in our community, and that asking people to share can go a long way.  With this in mind, we started to think of initiatives that would greatly benefit our community and that would be feasible to implement based on the resources that we had.  And that is when the LLC Nonprofit Leadership Webinar Series was created.

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By Claire Reinelt, Natalia Castaneda

Looking to increase your reach and influence in the social media space? Social Network Analysis (SNA), a research methodology that focuses on “mapping and measuring relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities,” (Orgnet.com) may be the answer. We recently partnered with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to explore how to effectively apply social network analysis to public health online communications strategies, how communications networks operate in Twitter and the blogosphere, and how to identify strategic and influential connections that can be nurtured over time to extend the reach of public health messaging. This was an innovative project that produced detailed and insightful information about how to use SNA to strategize communications campaigns, and we wanted to share some of these insights with the community – including specific recommendations for identifying key messages, influencers, and engagement strategies.

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The Leadership Learning Community and World Café Europe have partnered to present this preconference experiential workshop at the upcoming International Leadership Association conference.  Here are the details:
When: Wednesday, 26 October; 09:00 - 13:00
More information: ILA conference website

The pressing issues of our time such as environmental challenges, intercultural issues and emerging social challenges (to name just a few) require effective leadership that can solve intractable problems and produce sustainable change. This session will focus on what can happen when we bring a network approach to leadership in communities, countries and regions worldwide.

World Café Europe and the Leadership Learning Community will host a dialogue to explore how more inclusive, networked and collective leadership approaches that can unleash transformational change. This dialogue will draw on findings from a collaborative research initiative of innovative thinkers and practitioners. Together we will reflect on the changes that will enable us to magnify the impact of our leadership work and identify the obstacles to making this change. In addition, we will explore specific steps to support leadership development approaches which foster breakthrough ideas and collective action on social purpose issues.

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As part of the Leadership for a New Era project, we are exploring programs and initiatives that are developing the leadership of networks, communities and regions and accomplishing significant results with fewer resources.  In the following weeks we will present short summaries of some of the examples we have reviewed:

ELIAS, which stands for Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors, is a global innovation and learning community that focuses on regional platforms for facilitating multi-stakeholder innovation across entire systems. Coming together around specific thematic and geographic concerns, key players across the sectors of government, business, and civil society embark on a shared sensing and innovation journey in order to deepen their understanding of their current systems and to discover and prototype new ideas and collaborative opportunities that could take the system forward on the best possible path.

ELIAS was co-created by the Presencing Institute, the MIT CoLab, and the MIT Leadership Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. It has more than a dozen global partner institutions in business, government, and civil society, and it has sponsored multi sector change initiatives in both the global South and the global North.

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A year ago, Education Pioneers made the courageous decision to depart from our conventional alumni engagement strategy to an innovative network strategy.  Our new direction employs tactics that build relationships amongst our alumni rather than to our institution.  This reorientation required us to challenge our assumptions about how we develop education leaders capable of transforming education in the 21^st century.

Our fellows hail from the country’s most selective business, education, policy, and law graduate programs that have turned leadership development into a rich social science, but have also built their programs around the navigation of traditional hierarchies and the common scenarios of an institution.  In order to build a professional network of leaders that work across agencies, Education Pioneers is revamping our curriculum to include components that teach emerging leaders how to turn to one another to accelerate change in the field.

As Education Pioneers’ director of network strategy, I reviewed academic literature and boiled the salient findings down to five network leadership competencies that we’re weaving into our curricula at Education Pioneers. 

Read on for a look at practices that you can use to advance your career and deepen your impact as a professional.

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What do you think is missing in the ways we think about and support leadership that prevents breakthrough change on economic and racial equity? That is one of the questions we are exploring as part of a project focused on identifying innovative leadership approaches and models with the potential to reach tangible progress on seemingly intractable social problems like economic and racial inequity in urban and rural areas that affect life opportunities for low-income families and children.

As part of the exploration we are hosting two Innovation Labs in Boston and the Bay Area.  The goal of the Labs is to develop leadership scenarios that can help address key issues.  For the Boston lab, the framing question is: What will it take to catalyze and support 1000s of leaders to align their efforts and work together to insure that all children grow up "whole"?

Thought leaders in each area will come together to brainstorm and prototype different ideas and scenarios. Participants for the Boston lab include:  New Resource Strategies, Boston Alliance for GLBT Youth, Health Resources in Action, Thrive in 5 Leadership Council, Interaction Institute for Social Change, Open Society Institute, Boston Youth Organizing Project, DCA, Arbor Consulting Partners and Matey Odonkor (a user experience designer).  Kenny Bailey and Lori Lobenstine, from the Design Studio for Social Intervention, and Claire Reinelt, from the Leadership Learning Community, will facilitate and document the conversation.

We invite you to join the discussion – here are some of the ways you can participate:

• Listen In: We will be live tweeting during the innovation labs so be sure to tune in and share your questions and ideas – please use the following hashtag: #leadershipnet Here are the dates:
  • Boston Innovation Lab: Friday, September 16 2011 from 9:00 am – 1:00 pm EST
  • Bay Area Lab: Monday, September 19 2011 from 10:00 am – 2:00 pm PST
• Join the Discussion: visit our LinkedIn group to join the conversation or share your ideas through this form
• Watch Videos: we will record short video interviews with some of the participants and share those through Twitter and the LLC website

We look forward to getting your questions and ideas! read more »

Over the next several months, the Leadership Learning Community has been funded to design and implement a scanning process to identify innovative leadership approaches and models with the potential to significantly enhance tangible progress on seemingly intractable social problems like economic and racial inequity in urban and rural areas that affect life opportunities for low-income families and children.

We encourage you to join the conversation and send us your thoughts around the following question:

What do you think is missing in the ways we think about and support leadership that prevents breakthrough change on economic and racial equity?

Share your Thoughts!

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In 2004, Kristine Maltrud was Coordinator for the Healthy Native Communities Partnership (HNCP) Learning Team, based in New Mexico.  HNCP is a non-profit organization based on the Navajo community of Shiprock, New Mexico, that supports capacity building, leadership development partnership, and networking so that Native communities are better prepared to realize their own vision of wellness.  During a series of internal meetings, the Learning Team recognized they would benefit from reaching out to learn from other leadership development organizations. Kristine did some research and found Leadership Learning Community (LLC) on the web, which was listed as an organization that specialized in leadership evaluation. 

Upon finding LLC, Kristine contacted Deborah Meehan, LLC’s Executive Director, and made plans to travel to Oakland to meet with LLC.  HNCP was interested in learning more about how to expand support for alumni of their program.  They recognized that the one-year fellowship program, while highly valued, does not enable fellows to reach their full support.  Learning from others about how to provide continued support and access to resources post-Fellowship was a top priority when Kristine traveled to Oakland.  read more »

Sally Leiderman is President and one of the founders of the Center for Assessment and Policy Development (CAPD), a 23 year-old non-profit organization.   CAPD’s mission is to help foundations, community collaborations and organizations and governments and public systems craft and execute thoughtful responses to pressing social issues.   She first became involved with LLC at the Creating Space convening in Boston and has subsequently attended several other Creating Space Meetings. 

At the time of the meeting in Boston, Sally and CAPD were attempting to identify different strategies for evaluating transformative change.  Transformative, personal leadership was a popular topic, but most of the literature on it made the claim that it was intangible and immeasurable. The Creating Space convening addressed these issues and Sally was encouraged to formulate a cross-program learning project that brought together three programs to explore experiences with personal transformation and develop a set of outcomes.

“When I came to Boston, we were challenged in one of the sessions to think about cross-program learning.  That was the impetus for me to ask [William Graustein] if he would support a project on values-based leadership.” read more »