Leadership Development
HIghlighted Documents
Thriving Rural Communities 2.0 Dashboard Evaluation Report Sally Leiderman and Stephanie Halbert Jones, February 2016
Leadership and Large-Scale Change: How to Accelerate Learning and Deepen Impact Deborah Meehan, Claire Reinelt and Sally Leiderman. June 2015
Investigation Of Cost Benefit Analyses For Leadership Programs Prepared by Sally Leiderman, CAPD. December, 2008
Thriving Hispanic/Latino Communities Initiative Summative Report 2008 to 2014 Executive Summary Sally A. Leiderman and Stephanie Halbert Jones, CAPD, for the Duke Endowment, September 2014
As we and our co-authors noted in Leadership & Large Scale Social-Change (2015), “Individual and collective leadership has always been integral to effective efforts to advance social justice and to make broad, meaningful social change. President Obama, in his March 2015 speech in Selma acknowledged the critical role of leadership in advancing voter rights 50 years ago...We were reminded of the value of leadership on multiple fronts, drawing on the strengths and networks of many different constituencies, from many backgrounds, with both overlapping and complementary skills—men and women, people of color and white people, young and old, local and from outside, organizers, citizens, pastors, lawyers, farmers, and students—all with both collective and separate parts to play towards a common goal.” For CAPD, what that has meant is that we always include attention to the capacities of leadership in our work - whether we are designing or implementing a change effort, doing evaluation or creating capacity building resources.
In some instances, we are directly looking at the identification, strengthening and results of leadership development efforts. We have completed multi-year evaluations of, for example, the Berrie Fellows Leadership Program (retroactive and prospective two year evaluation of the first 3 cohorts), the Community Leadership Program in New Haven (prospective evaluation of the first five cohorts), Americans for Indian Opportunities Ambassadors program for mid-career Native leaders (prospective and retrospective evaluation of the first 10 cohorts), Healing the Heart of Diversity (prospective evaluation of the first 3 cohorts). From the latter three evaluations, Dr. Davido Dupree, a cognitive psychologist previously on CAPD’s staff and now a Board member, developed a tool for assessing individual steps along a path of personal transformation that lead to social action. We continue to use that tool and have shared it with others in the Handbook of Leadership Development Evaluation and other ways.
We also focus on the contributions of leadership (as a set of capacities) and leaders (as individuals, cohorts or networks) in efforts to improve other types of outcomes. With the people doing the work, we hypothesize how leadership is expected to contribute to the efforts’ goals. That thinking is then embedded in initiative design,research questions, theories of change, logic models and other framing tools. Over the years, we have applied this embedded approach to, for example, assessing the formation of rural pastors (Thriving Rural Communities Initiative) and people doing Hispanic/Latino ministry (Thriving Hispanic/Latino Communities Initiative), understanding the roles of parent leadership in early childhood initiatives (Discovery, The Children’s First Initiative), the roles of indigenous leadership (Communities Creating Racial Equity Initiative, Project Change),and intergenerational leadership (Communities for All Ages Initiative) in community change efforts, and the necessary and sufficient set of competencies for effective social justice/racial equity leadership (RESPECT consultation, Project Change and the Strong Sector Cluster evaluation).
As described in the section on racial equity, we are also co-creating a curriculum for leadership development programs to help those programs embed more explicit attention to white privilege and its consequences in their racial equity and social justice trainings. For this training, Transforming White Privilege: A 21st Century Leadership Capacity, CAPD is partnering with MP Associates and World Trust Educational Services, Inc. Together, we are working to develop, pilot and disseminate the curriculum, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. CAPD is a member of the Leadership Learning Communities (LLC) Funders/Evaluators circle, and has contributed to several of LLC’s publications, including the Leadership & Large Scale Social-Change article cited at the beginning of this section. LLC also generously provided a seed grant to allow us to survey their members to research and understand how a white privilege curriculum might benefit leadership development groups.
Publications and Presentations
How to Develop and Support Leadership that Contributes to Racial Justice Leadership for a New Era Series, July 2010
Observing Values in Action: Stories and Lessons from the Work of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund Sally A. Leiderman, CAPD, Donna Studdiford, On Point Consulting, Inc. August 2010
How to Develop and Support Leadership that Contributes to Racial Justice Leadership for a New Era Series, July 2010
The Handbook of Leadership Development Evaluation Kelly Hannum, Jennifer Martineau, Claire Reinelt, Laura C. Leviton, Sally A. Leiderman, CAPD. February 2007. Available from the publisher, Jossey-Bass, ISBN 978-0-7879-8780-0
Parents at the Center: A Guide to Parent Inclusion, Engagement and Leadership CAPD for the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, April 2002
Brief Lessons on Leadership CAPD, February 1999