Presenter: Steve Waddell

As part of the Leadership for a New Era (LNE) initiative - a collaborative research initiative that seeks to promote more inclusive, networked and collective leadership models - the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) has generated a series of "How To" guides for leadership program staff. The guides are supported by funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Lessons About Leadership and Social Connectedness
from the Work of Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of Minnesota

I was honored to join the BCBS MN board several years ago because I am a big fan of their social determinants of health and health equity work.  I was invited to help the board think about how to integrate leadership into their program work.  I hope that they have benefited even half as much as I have from this relationship. Their commitment to social connectedness as a critical strategy for improving health outcomes has taken my thinking about leadership in some new directions.
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LLC Member Spotlight: Cheryl Francisconi

Cheryl Francisconi is an international pioneer in designing and implementing leadership strategies at the country level to meet the needs of local and emerging leaders by providing them with the supports they need to take their leadership to the next level, including being part of an in-country leadership network. LLC had the pleasure of working with Cheryl on a reproductive health leadership evaluation in the mid-2000s. As a program director, Cheryl always advocated for leadership approaches that were responsive to the needs of participants.  Too often leadership programs provide a one size fits all curriculum, with no plans for follow-on engagement of alumni.  Not so for the Leadership Development for Mobilizing Reproductive Health program that Cheryl ran, which was a model of a more sustainable and impactful approach to developing and supporting leadership in developing countries, like Ethiopia.  Cheryl always speaks with passion, clarity, and deep credibility about what it takes to support leadership in ways that are sustainable and impactful over the long haul.    

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Welcome Miriam Persley to the LLC Team!

We are happy to announce the addition of Miriam Persley to the LLC team as our new Administrative Assistant. Miriam comes to LLC with administrative support experience from various public and private organizations in the Berkeley and Los Angeles areas. She possesses a solid grasp of accounts payable/receivable and event coordination, which is combined with her demonstrated commitment to social justice. An example of her professional experience is her employment as Program Coordinator at UC Berkeley's Cal NERDS program, whose mission is to support people of color, women, and those with disabilities towards a learning community in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. During this time Miriam organized all aspects of the annual student symposium, including the conference travel and calendar management, as well as monitoring the financial aspects of the event. Miriam has consistently been able to merge social change efforts with administrative duties in this way. Miriam holds a Bachelor's Degree in Latin American Literature from UC Berkeley. Her passion for creating communities and educating people motivates her work at LLC and her interpersonal exchanges.
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Three years ago the Leadership Learning Community made a stunning realization after looking at its balance sheets: the year that we built our largest reserve correlated with the volume of consulting projects we completed. Since then, LLC has been building up the consulting side of its nonprofit business to create additional revenue streams of support for our mission work. We’ve had the chance to optimize the way leadership development is conceived, developed, and implemented through foundation grants and through our consulting work with foundations and like-minded nonprofits. read more »

On Networks and Resilience...

In Curtis Ogden’s article Dimensions of Network Success, he revisits IISC’s framework for assessing the determinants and definitions of success and draws parallels with Plastrik and Taylor’s  matrix on Differing Characteristics of the Three Networks from their 2006 publication NET GAINS: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change. Valdis Krebs writes on Infrastructure Resilience in his article reflecting on lessons from the book, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. Krebs poses that using Social Network Analysis to identify and create alternative paths in a network is key for network resilience.

On Evaluation...

The podcast Making Change recently featured Hildy Gottlieb’s interview with Michael Quinn Patton, an author of five books on program evaluation. In the podcast, Patton discusses evaluating programs in times of rapid change. Ellen Remmer of The Philanthropic Initiative Inc., writes on the recent proliferation of the concept of social capital, following several examples of foundations, including Barr Foundation with the eight-year-old Barr Fellows Network, that have put forth effort in this area.

Image Source: IISC 2012

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By: Bidisha Banerjee, Dalai Lama Fellows

Dalai Lama Fellows is a new program personally authorized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to guide a global network of young social entrepreneurs to deepen their effectiveness by embracing secular ethics and contemplative values. Over the past two years, we have given grants of up to $10,000 to student-led compassion-in-action projects in locations including Oakland, Appalachia, Atlanta, New York City, Kashmir, Dharamsala, Yogayakarta, Ghana, Jerusalem, Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Tanzania, Egypt, Kenya, the Philippines, and Navajo Nation.

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I recently participated in a “think tank” for researchers and evaluators that have been meeting to harvest their learning from community leadership development research and evaluations; and share it with the community leadership development field. The “think tank” met this week to outline a white paper on lessons learned. Topics included in the white paper include focusing on: (1)  purpose and results of leadership development; (2) who is recruited to participate; (3) how the program is designed and delivered; (4) the content of the program; (5) how impact is evaluated; and (6) future research questions. We will share this white paper when it comes out.  In the meantime, the “think tank” will present its lessons learned and examples of work in an upcoming LLC webinar in October.  Stay tuned to the LLC webinar page for the announcement of dates.

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