Key Resources

After decades of study and practice of leadership and race, LLC has come to believe in the importance of layering on another focal point: liberatory leadership. We could not end the Leadership and Race, A Call to Each Other report without giving you a sneak peek of our upcoming Liberatory Leadership Framework, which we will share more broadly in early 2025. We invite you to explore, unpack, and connect with this short excerpt at the end of Leadership and Race report, which contains a high-level definition of what we mean when we say “Liberatory Leadership” and some resources related to our learnings. This sneak peek builds on our insight into the current leadership and racial justice landscape and the pockets of great work happening in all corners of the social justice ecosystem.

Below you can listen to the Liberatory Leadership Framework sneak peek narrated by Duchesne Drew.

Leadership & Race: A Call to Each Other, Exploration of the Current Racial Justice Landscape and Recommendations for Action explores leadership and race beyond structural racism and offers guidance to leaders, intermediaries, and those in philanthropy seeking progress toward racial justice. 

As we wrote this report, we acknowledge that we, too, are experiencing much of what we will discuss in this report – they are not just words on a page. Though there are moments of celebration and hope here, much of the content is weighty, and you may experience that weight in your body and spirit. 

We worked with over 25 leaders and reviewed dozens of articles, white papers, and other material to complete our capture of race and leadership in 2024. Our collective hope is that this report will be grounded in relationships, inspire new relationships, and deepen pre-existing relationships. In short, we hope you felt seen somewhere in here. This report is meant to be space for us and each other.

Whole Communities Project is proud to announce our magazine

“HOME is Where the LOVE Is.”

This magazine is for people firmly entrenched in their quest for liberation and adamant about bringing their formations and communities along. In it, you will find in-depth stories from leaders within the Whole Communities Project ecosystem and their offerings on how to deepen your commitment to liberatory leadership. We also provide tools and resources to support you on your path. 

We make this offering with full knowledge that it comes in perilous times and that the call for leaders to meet this urgency is high. Stopping and considering how to deepen our commitment to liberatory leadership is not a quick, easy, or convenient process. However, if you take nothing else from this magazine, we hope you find community and a feeling that you are not alone within these pages. 

About Whole Communities Project: Launched in the Fall of 2023, the Whole Communities Project is a collaboration between the Center for Third World Organizing, The Fund for Liberatory Practice launched by the LeadersTrust, and Leadership Learning Community. Our mission is to connect liberation-centered leaders and organizations to life-affirming resources that support their emergence and sustainability in the work. To that end, we curate leadership development programs, funding, convenings, webinars, and communities of practice for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color leaders and practitioners.

We are grateful for the work of the Liberatory Leadership Project and its partners for deeply exploring liberatory leadership and providing the foundations of this work. The Whole communities Project was made possible by Black women who worked closely with cohort members, workshop participants, and grantees and remained steadfast in their commitment to liberation and transformation, namely:

Holly Delaney Cole
Iman Mills Gordon
Sadia Hassan
Justine Ingram
Nikita Mitchell
Kierra Sims-Drake
Ericka Stallings
Trish Adobea Tchume
Chinyere Tutashinda
Kharyshi Wiginton
Ashlee Wimberly

In the words of Iyanla Vanzant, “Inside of you, there is a place called home.” Through this Zine, we asked amazing liberatory leaders to open your homes and show us yourselves. You did just that! We would like to thank all of the participants who contributed to this project.

Mizan
Sizwe
Greg Hodge
Elissa Sloan Perry
Felicia Griffin
Zulayka Santiago
Ditra Edwards
Falilah Aisha Bilal

A special thank you to Noni Limar, the Creative Director, and Devan King, the Graphic Designer,   who listened to our stories and curated this magazine which invites all of us back to liberation.

In 2023, the Leadership Learning Community partnered with the Hewlett Foundation to support leaders in organizations going through leadership transitions.

Leadership transitions are a time of challenge and opportunity for organizations. Transitions include recruiting incoming leaders, offboarding prior leadership, onboarding new leadership, and integrating board and staff. The process is often more robust than leaders, staff, and board are aware of and requires significant investment of resources and attention. When successful, cultural, emotional, interpersonal, financial, operational, and reputational opportunities can be enjoyed.

In 2018, LLC engaged our extensive network to generate content for a tool to support practice leaders in establishing comprehensive leadership development programs that contribute to racial equity. This year we completed the compilation of your knowledge and ideas in the Race Equity Toolkit for Leadership Development. Over 60 members of our network contributed their wisdom and resources to this toolkit.

Our new publication, Leading Culture and Systems Change: How to Develop Network Leadership and Support Emerging Networks, examines why people and organizations working on complex systemic problems (like climate change and structural racism) are using network approaches to make more progress. Network leadership requires a shift away from the dominant thinking that sees leadership as the achievements of exceptional individuals rather than the collective efforts of people working together around commonly held goals and aspirations.

This publication is a guide with very practical ideas about how to make network principles a way of working and leading.

This report was funded to answer the following questions using a series of interviews, research, and findings from a meeting of 45 evaluators and program officers with leadership development expertise, hosted on October 2014 at the Annie E. Casey Foundation: What are the key elements of leadership development approaches that are contributing to measurable progress on significant social problems? What evaluation approaches are being used or developed to successfully measure and document the impact of leadership development that results in large-scale change? What opportunities exist to replicate, spread, adapt, or apply lessons from these models to increase the impact of leadership development programming and investments?

As part of the Leadership for a New Era (LNE) initiative, the Leadership Learning Community has partnered with thought leaders in the network development and leadership development fields to develop the cutting-edge report Leadership and Networks: New Ways of Developing Leadership in a Highly Connected World. This publication is funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. This report is written for those who run and fund leadership programs that develop and support leadership for social change. It shares many examples of how leaders using network strategies are increasing the impact of social change work, such as the Barr Fellowship Network and MomsRising.org. Our goal is to inspire and help hundreds of leadership programs to question their assumptions about the traditional leadership models and retool their approaches in ways that will enable them to better prepare those in leadership with the mindset and skills they will need to more fully leverage network strategies. Specifically, the report addresses the following questions: Why do network strategies deserve our attention? Why do we need a new leadership mindset? What are the core principles of leading with a network mindset? What leadership development strategies support a network mindset and skills?

The Leadership and Race publication “How to Develop and Support Leadership that Contributes to Racial Justice” is part of the Leadership for a New Era series. This publication explores the ways in which our current thinking about leadership often contributes to producing and maintaining racialized dynamics and identifies a set of core competencies associated with racial justice leadership. Recommendations are included for helping leadership programs develop and support leadership that furthers racial justice in organizations, communities, and the broader society.