alumni

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 »

If you don’t know the story, the Leadership Learning Community, grew out of efforts to convene graduates of multiple leadership programs in target regions across the United States in an effort to build a diverse leadership force for local community change.  I thought it was a great idea but this early effort fell flat.  When I invited leadership programs to share contact information or forward invitations so that their graduates could meet up with other leadership program graduates in their region, one program after another offered variations of ‘no’ that went something like, “We have to get our own fellows together first”, or “our fellows are too busy”.   Of course the good news was that through these conversations with people running leadership programs it became clear that the ground was ripe for some rich cross program learning and people took quickly to this idea and here we are 10 years later.  And maybe the idea of connecting leadership program graduates on a new scale was just a little before its time, but that was then and times have changed!  We can do more to connect the busy graduates of our leadership programs to increase the impact of their efforts, not by working more but by working smarter through networks.

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Over the years we have talked a lot about leadership program networks. In leadership program evaluations we often hear from program participants that relationships formed with others in the program are one of the most valuable and enduring parts of their experience. We have heard stories about these relationships fostering collaborations, providing an ongoing source of consultation and advice and as an information resource exchange network. It’s no wonder that leadership programs are eager to leverage the impact of these relationships by building sustainable networks of program graduates.

The network buzz over the last several years has inspired leadership programs to imagine new possibilities for vibrant networks of their program graduates. The good news is that we have an opportunity to learn from a growing field of network organizing strategies. The bad news is that this field of work does not support conventional thinking and approaches to building alumni networks. read more »