A couple of weeks ago I joined a panel of presenters on a webinar hosted by Johns Hopkins’ Center for a Livable Future focused on collective impact and network building for food policy councils. Other panelists included Ellen Kahler from Vermont Farm to Plate Network, Jennifer Obadia from Health Care Without Harm, and Whitney Fields from Indianapolis Food Council. My role was to provide an overview of collective impact, giving credit to FSG and the Collective Impact Forum for codifying and advancing research and practice in this arena, as well as network building principles as applied to collaborative efforts to realize more local, just and sustainable food production, distribution and access. Read More
If you are a regular reader you’ve heard me talk about the Barr Fellows. It is one of the most powerful experiments in developing a leadership network within a geographic context – the City of Boston. I have the privilege of being on the design and facilitation team for this remarkable project.Read More
The following is the first installment of an email exchange among Chris Thompson of the Fund for our Economic Future, Alison Gold of Living Cities, and me that was initiated given our shared interest in and practice around supporting cross-sectoral multi-stakeholder collaboration. I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with Alison at the Community Foundations Conference in San Diego last fall, and of meeting Chris through Alison, though initially through the Next City story on network building for economic development in Northeast Ohio. To date, this has gotten us to core questions around what it takes to cultivate collective will for collaboration. We invite you to join the conversation.
On Jan 5, 2014, at 1:39 PM, Chris Thompson wrote:
Based on my Twitter feed I suspect more people than ever have this as their New Year’s Resolution: “I will collaborate more.” The oracle himself, Thomas Friedman, sang its praises in this morning’s Times. Read More
Being part of the design and facilitation team for the Barr Fellows Network has been some of the most rewarding work I get to do. It is rewarding because it is beautiful and because it works. I have witnessed lives change, approaches to leadership transformed. And I am getting to witness the effect of this work upon the city that I love. I hope you have the 90 seconds it will take for you to enjoy this video. You can read the original post here.
If you have not already seen it, our friends at the Leadership Learning Community have published a rich new resource entitled “Leadership and Networks: New Ways of Developing Leadership in a Highly Connected World.” Some of us at IISC contributed to this publication, directly and indirectly, and overall it seems to do a nice job of bringing together otherwise disparate stories about the power of networks in guiding leadership development and movements for change. Here you will find brief overviews of instructive cases such as the Barr Fellows Network, Lawrence CommunityWorks, the RE-AMP Network, and KaBOOM!, along with a list of additional resources and readings. I also appreciate how it explicitly builds the case for considering network approaches, including their ability to: Read More
Comments Off on Leadership and NetworksJanuary 25, 2012
Picking up from Gibran’s post yesterday and continuing in the vein of follow-up to our LLC webinar on collective leadership, I want to respond to some of the questions we did not have a chance to answer or answer fully from participants, including requests for examples of collective leadership in action and inquiries about blocks and how to work through or overcome them. Read More
In my last post I shared observations on building a leadership network and lessons from the Barr Fellowship. What is the role of a facilitator in such an effort? It is not an easy role to fill. The facilitator has to be able to design and hold a space that makes it possible for the group to move, to shift, to grow, while fully trusting the group’s capacity to do so. The facilitator must be able to rely on the passion and purpose that is already present among the leaders who are coming together.
I’m currently engaged in a number of network building efforts, each different in scope and scale, all focused on leadership and collaboration. My work with the Barr Fellows is one such effort. I have been working closely with the 2009 cohort of fellows and will be working closely with the 2011 cohort. I am also working on the effort to integrate all four cohorts into a Barr Fellows Network; a leadership network that can significantly affect social change in Boston. Read More
Working closely with the Berkana Institute, Gibrán and Marianne had the privilege of facilitating the Barr Fellows learning journey to Chiapas, Mexico. Here they are at the conclusion of their journey, getting ready to enter the Church of San Juan Chamula, which actually is a Mayan Temple that the people consider to be the very center of the Universe.
