Generating ideas, connections, and action

Sustaining Networks Learning Circle

At LLC's national meeting in 2002, Creating Space III, there was a strong mandate from leadership programs and funders to build the potential for a national network of alumni by strengthening each leadership programs' capacity to effectively engage their graduates in sustainable networks.

LLC conducted several learning sessions with over a dozen leadership programs to mine lessons and innovative practices that support the sustainability of fellowship networks. The results of this learning are available in the knowledge and resources area.

During the LLC national meeting, Creating Space IV, in May 2003, participants in the Sustaining Networks Circle sessions began actively building relationships across programs around some joint ventures. The group has continued to meet and recently has been documenting its work using a wiki.

Blog Entries

  • What attracts and sustains your participation in leadership networks?
    Claire Reinelt

    This is one of the questions the Boston Learning Circle will be exploring in an upcoming Conversation on Leadership and Networks.  I started to reflect about my own participation in leadership networks, about what attracted my participation and why I remain committed. In 2000, when I joined Deborah to establish learning circles among practitioners of leadership development, I invited evaluation practitioners to form a network to co-evolve our practice together, and collectively influence the field of philanthrophy.  We formed an unlikely alliance since we often competed with each other for work. These were the days when evaluation contracts were more substantial than they are today!  I was attracted to form an evaluation learning circle by the unparelled opportunity to learn with colleagues I respected.  I knew we all had gifts to share with each other, that would push our collective capacity forward.  We became a community voice in the fields of evaluation, leadership development, and philanthropy. 

    03/16/2010 - 07:02
  • The Lab: The Impact Brokers Virtual Learning Laboratory
    Janice Epstein

    Welcome to the Impact Brokers virtual learning laboratory where your thoughtful input is seriously welcome! What is Impact Brokers (IB), you ask? In a nutshell, IB is a radically different way of ‘doing’ social change. We are a group of nonprofit organizations, funders, consultants, and community members who have been meeting since January 2008 to solve complex social problems together by identifying common issues, discovering root causes and strengthening our collaborative capacity for change. We meet quarterly for Learning Community Meetings to, among other things, review individual and shared capacity building projects and otherwise strengthen our relationships for the benefit of the whole.

    LLC awarded IB’s Boston Member Circle a Community Seed grant to support an online learning lab to explore the themes of social capital and networks within the framework of adaptive and collective leadership. If you are choking on that sentence like I am, here’s a Heimlich: we’re going to deepen our understanding of what we do and how we do it so that we can capitalize on our relationships for the benefit of all involved.

    So, to christen this learning laboratory, we want to talk a bit about leadership and, specifically leadership that is not carried out by one person. For in the IB Boston Member Circle, there purposely is no one leader. In A New Look at Leadership in Collaborative Networks: Process Catalysts, Mandell and Keast write that leadership in collaborative networks is “the process of getting all members to interact in new ways that tap into their strengths” and that “leadership…is about focusing on the processes of building a new whole rather than primarily focusing on more efficient ways to deliver services.”

    08/31/2008 - 18:28
  • Leadership and Sustaining Breakthrough Change
    Claire Reinelt

    For anyone interested in creating and sustaining breakthrough change, you may want to read a fascinating article by Matthew Chin entitled Sustainability and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (September 2003). Matthew runs Operations Success Programs with the Primary Care Development Corporation, an organization that helps health centers and clinics form learning collaboratives to achieve and sustain transformational change in serving the poor, the uninsured, and the under-insured in New York City.

    After years of implementing a highly successful organizational learning model in diverse health centers and clinics, he and his colleagues became interested in why clinics and health centers have a hard time sustaining the gains that they made. He discovered that leadership was critical to long-term success.

    02/25/2008 - 12:50
  • Three LLC Circles Share Learning About Sustainable Leadership Networks
    Claire Reinelt

    Three LLC circles (Sustaining Networks/Alumni, Social Media and Leadership, and Health Leadership) convened for a conference call and web-based meeting using the WebEx platform to discuss creating and sustaining leadership networks. Twenty people explored the following questions:

    • What forms of collaboration and network creation are we seeing in the leadership development arena?
    • What tools or processes do we find strengthen leadership networks?
    • What are the biggest challenges to sustaining network participation?
    02/04/2008 - 14:31
  • Let's Stand Up For Creativity in 2008 (and beyond)
    tomtee

    To the Presidents and Deans of America's Arts, Theater, Design, Engineering, Science, and Journalism Schools: In one year we'll be asked to choose a President, 34 Senators, all 435 Congressmen, 11 governors, and thousands of state and local officials. Do you know of any candidate, at any level, that has a platform on creativity, the arts or innovation? Neither do I.

    01/29/2008 - 14:16
  • Networks and Communities of Practice: What is the difference?
    Claire Reinelt

    Networks and communities of practice are often terms that are used interchangeably. Is there a difference?

    09/09/2007 - 09:12
  • Interactive on-line alumni directories
    Claire Reinelt

    Have you created an interactive on-line directory that enables alumni of your program to connect with each other around shared interests and to find resources?

    07/25/2007 - 12:55
  • Learning about Networks
    Claire Reinelt

    Welcome to the Evaluation Learning Circle blog space! We invite you to register to our site and create your own blog to share resources, ideas, and stimulate conversations about leadership development evaluation that are important to you. Here's my first blog post.... In the last few years there has been growing interest among those in the leadership development field to develop and strengthen leadership networks. One of the tools for understanding networks is Social Network Analysis (SNA).

    07/22/2007 - 12:04

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Summary of Five Programs Discussing Their Alumni Development Practices
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