Claire Reinelt
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Current economic conditions have increased pressure on foundations to optimize their investments. This article offers a tool for doing this in an area of high leverage: leadership development. It offers a framework for assessing a foundation’s current approach in this area that reflects the rising significance of collective leadership. This article is based on an in-depth review of leadership development practices carried out by one of the authors in three sectors – government, business, and social – as well as in the emerging multistakeholder sector. It reflects as well another of the authors’ experiences evaluating leadership development programs and initiatives that have vastly different purposes, and co-creating with funders and evaluators a framework for assessing leadership investments that can guide program and evaluation design.
Authors: Grady McGonagill, Claire Reinelt
Subjects: leadership, investment framework
06/01/2011 - 00:00 - 0 comments - 1 attachment - Posted by Natalia Castaneda
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The Leadership Development Investment Framework is a tool developed to assist funders, program staff, and evaluators clarify the purposes of leadership development and capacity-building supports. In 2008, we partnered with United Way Toronto to adapt the original Leadership Development Investment Framework that was produced by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations in 2005. The tool was useful in assisting the United Way and other leadership funders in Canada to become more intentional about where they are currently investing resources, where there are gaps in investment, and how they might work together to maximize the impact of their resources. Grady McGonagill adapted the framework further by adding the dimension of teams and team building capacity as part of a study for the Bertelsmann Foundation. Claire Reinelt and LLC Board Member and Leadership Consultant Grady McGonagill have continued to refine the framework and explore ways that funders can use this tool to better align their leadership investments internally and externally with others. At a recent Funders' Circle meeting designed for funders to learn more about each other's work and find synergies across strategies, issues and geographic areas, the attached summary of the framework was shared. This summary describes changes that occur at five levels: individual, team, organizational, community, and field. Since most foundations seek to develop a range of leadership capacities across multiple levels, choosing the right approaches and combining the right strategies is a process of experimentation and learning. To make the framework more useful, we have added examples of different programs and how they invest in leadership development. This framework provides a comprehensive view of 25 potential leadership development opportunities organized in a 5 x 5 matrix. The matrix enables stakeholders to identify patterns in their current investment strategies; engage in deeper dialogue about the purposes for investing in leadership; and become more intentional about the directions in which they want to invest moving forward. Through sharing strategies and lessons learned among funders, successful approaches can be adapted and tried in different contexts. Please refer to the document for additional information on the framework.
Authors: Claire Reinelt, Grady McGonagill
Subjects: leadership, evaluation
11/23/2009 - 01:00 - 0 comments - 1 attachment - Posted by Natalia Castaneda
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This article describes an initiative developed by The California Endowment (TCE) to explore how best to support leadership capacity development in low-income communities and communities of color to create health. TCE’s investment strategies were developed in response to growing disparities in health outcomes and a recognition that there would be little improvement in those disparities without effective, engaged, and connected leadership among underrepresented populations. With the changing demographics in California, TCE is committed to amplifying and aligning the voices of immigrant, youth, and ethnic communities so that they can more effectively influence the systems that affect the health quality of low-income communities and communities of color.
Authors: Claire Reinelt, Dianne Yamashiro-Omi, Deborah Meehan
Subjects: leadership, health
10/04/2010 - 09:21 - 0 comments - 1 attachment - Posted by Natalia Castaneda
