Investing in Leadership Development

Neha Singhal’s amazing work with Casa de Maryland to organize with domestic workers to fight against abusive working conditions, discussed in the interview in this newsletter, is a model of what real leadership looks like.  Through her Generation Change internship with the Center for Community Change, she is able to channel and explore her passion for immigrant rights and her budding interest in community organizing.  Neha’s work exemplifies leadership because it is not simply about her own development, but at the same time about developing the capacity of others to speak in their own voice.

Neha’s story and many more have given me occasion to reflect on the nature of leadership.

Neha is just one example of the Center’s commitment over the past several years to developing leaders, inside and outside the organization. This year our Generation Change program, led by Sue Chinn, after receiving 1200 applications, has placed 42 interns and 21 fellows in 47 partner organizations across the country.  The program has grown leaps and bounds from last year when the GenChange team received 240 applications for 26 internship placements and they collaborated with 19 host organizations.  Further, this year’s class of interns and fellows is the most diverse yet.  They group is predominantly women (73%) and predominantly people of color (85%).  The Gen Change Team’s collaboration with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the Posse Foundation (a national organization that recruits low income students of color and provides emotional and financial support through four years of college) have resulted in an amazingly talented and diverse group of people committed to learning about social justice work through the lens of community organizing.

Our leadership development does not stop with interns and Fellows.  Our Democracy Schools program led by Mayron Payes trains grassroots immigrant leaders in the ways our democracy functions and doesn’t function.  The training relies on a highly participatory methodology and focuses on US civics, naturalization, and social movement history.  It has become a foundation for our advocacy work through the Fair Immigration Reform Movement.

Our Community Voting Project, led by Rudy Lopez and Irma Palacios, has trained hundreds of staff and leaders at community based organizations on civic participation.  The trainings cover everything from plan-writing to targeting to integration of voter work with ongoing issue and organizing work, to the use of state of the art electoral technology.

CCC’s own internal staff development program, led by Pamela Chiang, has taken 14 of our mid and senior staff people through an intense four week experience, focusing on everything from organizing to campaigns to personal mastery to structural racism theory. The program is helping us experiment with new ways of leading inside and outside the organization.

I myself have completed the wonderful Rockwood yearlong intensive leadership development program this year, which was a transformative experience personally and professionally – I’m on a joyous (and occasionally painful) journey of learning to “lead from the inside out.”

What are the lessons I’d draw from all this work revolving around leadership?

First, there are a set of skills – related to emotional and social intelligence, personal mastery, interpersonal communications and self-awareness, that are as important (and perhaps more so) than the “hard skills” that are typically taught in leadership programs.  The ability to think strategically and act powerfully in social change is directly related to the internal work we do.  Campaign, organizing and advocacy skills are critical, but need to be grown in the fertile soil of skills that enable us to build meaningful, transparent, and transformative relationships.

Second, real leaders have followers – and there is a complex, mutual relationship between the two.  Our culture and even the progressive movement tend to promote a culture of celebrity and individual accomplishment but real leadership requires being in a relationship of accountability to others, and it means paying real attention to the development of others.  The ethics of leadership – principles of accountability, transparency service, low ego, nurturing the leadership of others—needs to be taught, cultivated and renewed. 

Third, there is enormous hunger among young people to be a part of social change work in America and our sector will need to change to fully embrace this talent.  The enormous demand for our internship and fellowship programs – and the far greater interest among young people in the Obama campaign – speak to a revitalized energy and passion among people in their 20’s.  But our sector still tends to neglect youth.  Young people are rarely given positions of meaningful leadership in our organizations, they are rarely mentored or supported, and they are rarely provided a path for success. This generation is the best hope for a new kind of politics and society, and we need to rethink the way we create opportunities for young people to develop and grow in the movement. Otherwise we will not only have lost the next generation of leaders, but we will lose period. 

Fourth, we need visionary leadership that can see beyond old orthodoxies and take risks.  We need leaders who are willing to move beyond organization building to movement building, who can weave the cross issue and cross constituency coalitions it will take to make change on the scale that is required. 

There is something happening in America today – a shift in the wind and new possibilities emerging – the quality and depth of our investment in leadership will be answer to the question of our ability to seize the moment.

Deepak Bhargava is the Executive Director of the Center for Community Change.