Leadership Learning Community
Funders and Evaluation Circle Meeting
Hosted by Northwest Area Foundation
and
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation
How can we support the leadership values, diversity, and connectedness needed to achieve impact on our most significant social problems?
October 27th 9:00AM-4:30PM and October 28th 9:00AM-1:00PM
Northwest Area Foundation
60 Plato Boulevard East
St. Paul, MN
It's been a great meeting
Funders and Evaluators Meeting Objectives:
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To learn from innovations in leadership support strategies that have the potential to expand the scope, cultural relevance, and impact of our efforts
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To test a framework that aligns program purpose, activities and expected outcomes in order to deepen our understanding about how to influence community, field, and systems change
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To connect the learning and resources of leadership investors and evaluators who seek to strengthen the diversity and impact of leadership work.
Proposed Meeting Agenda (with meeting notes embedded)
October 27th, 9:00AM
I. Opening
A. Welcome: David Cournoyer and Joan Cleary of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation, and Jerry Uribe of Northwest Area Foundation welcomed participants to Minnesota. Jean Burkhardt, formerly of the Northwest Area Foundation and longtime member of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) provided a slice of historical background about the Drake building (which formerly housed a marble factory) where the meeting was being held and that is home to the Northwest Area Foundation.
B. Introductions of Participants: Deborah Meehan, Executive Director of the Leadership Learning Community, walked participants through a stand up/sit down exercise where they identified themselves in a variety of ways by standing (i.e. worked on collaborative projects; have used a wiki; worked with someone outside their own sector; and live in a swing state). The purpose of this exercise was to provide everyone with a glimpse of the diversity and wealth of experience in the room that we will be mining during the next day and a half.
The next exercise, introduced by Deborah, involved forming two concentric circles facing one another. Deborah posed a question and each person responded to their partner and were then directed to shift to the right whereby another question was posed (this exercise involved four shifts with a new question on each shift). The four questions posed were:
- Name one thing that has changed in your own thinking about leadership development in the last five years.
- What is the most important question about leadership development that you are bringing to this meeting?
- What impact do you hope to have through your leadership development work?
- How do you create opportunities for reflection in your work?
Deborah introduced Claire Reinelt, LLC Research and Evaluation Director, who is the lead for the Evaluation Circle. Claire provided a brief introduction and history of the Evaluation Circle and pointed out that it was one of the first circles to form about eight years ago.
Deborah then introduced Donna Stark, LLC Board Chair, and Chair of the Funders Circle. Donna extended a special thanks to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation and the Northwest Area Foundation for their generosity in hosting the convening and for demonstrating how we do the work in partnership. Donna noted the situation in today's economy - the markets and their impact on the sector. She asked, as part of introductions, for funders to briefly state what the "headline" was on how your foundation is thinking about managing the economy; how grant making will be impacted in the next year - a "headline" that reflects 'what's up' in your foundation(s). For those in the room who were not funders, she asked for a 'headline' reflecting their thoughts on what might be diminishing resources into the field.
- This comes at an interesting time in my foundation as we have been in the process of prioritizing anyway, and have been in a disciplined place the last five years and not growing our budgets. We are looking at postponing those projects that are not 'mission critical.' From an evaluation perspective, evaluation has moved to the bottom and it is the time to demonstrate evaluator impact.
- We are maintaining our commitment to staff. Looking at ways of financing, over time, our commitment to grantees so they won't suffer.
- Research
- Ramping up our program and adding elements to enchance the work with grantees.
- Seeing pressure from funders and nonprofits.
- Exciting time to be doing leadership development work; making small investments; tense and exciting.
- How to ride this out and support partners around evaluation that is very efficient.
- Commitment to leadership development and capacity building is still high on the agenda - board's decision to build resiliency and capacity is a wise decision.
- Keep staff commitment the same, and grant making as stable as possible. Maximize time by joining together some of the convening's.
- Really important to find ways to share information more effectively about what is working in communities.
- Now is when communities are going to need the dollars, so board made a decision not to pull back.
- Blue Cross Foundation creates leadership development program during times of need (that's the headline). Add the powerful component 'leadership' as part of the collective model - develop partnerships. This is the right moment for giving greater attention to components of health.
- Finding people are reluctant to make commitment to leadership development (of either time or money).
- This is a challenging time. Have already made a commitment for the next 18 months. How do we become much more focused, and how do we partner to increase our impact and leverage. How do we link our work that gives greater leverage and impact. Difficult choices and act on them as humanely as possible.
- Evaluation is needed more than ever, but doubtful it can be fully paid for.
- How does this change the public will? How does it shift leadership to develop a more equitable future?
- Concerned
- More bang for the buck.
- Holding the line in difficult time and building relationships. Building on community entrepreneurship from the ground up.
- Will we find the endless arc of forever solving the problem?
- Community and philanthropy upholding democracy in hard times.
- Crisis as opportunity - how to work together and leverage resources.
- When endowments go down, it can be an opportunity for other assets to emerge.
- Need to work with communities on changing their health.
- Wall Street - a failure in leadership. Issue of transparency and Wall Street has become less transparent.
Donna invited the funders in the room to join the LLC Funding Partnership (see links below):
Why Become an LLC Funding Partner
Funding Partner Form
Donna also wanted to say something about what these kind of gatherings have meant to her over the years. They are an opportunity for honest dialogue about running, funding and studying leadership development work. A place one comes where they can deeply connect with others to enrich their leadership work and bring it back to their communities, organizations and foundations.
C. Review Meeting Outcomes and Agenda
II. Learning from innovations in scale, process, impact and reaching new populations. This section of the meeting will use interactive formats to ground our learning with several current innovations in leadership approaches that begin to address some of the questions raised in the concept paper (Concept Paper).
David Cournoyer reviewed the proposed agenda and invited folks to the LLC wiki. He extended his thanks and appreciation to Karen Appelbaum of the Northwest Area Foundation and Regina Prather of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation for organizing the meeting logistics.
A. The "Morning Leadership Show" hosted by David Cournoyer
Horizons Program - Northwest Area Foundation: The Horizons Program focuses on poverty elimination in small rural and reservation communities and is seeking to engage close to 300 communities by 2010.
Jean Burkhardt, Becky Kroll and Jerry Uribe comprised the panel discussing the Horizons Program. In introducing the genesis of this program, Jean Burkhardt said that the question posed was why no traction was being achieved by communities in poverty reduction and elimination. The response arrived at was that it was an issue of leadership. The program 2008 Horizons Community Guide works to build capacity, leadership and leadership capacity to reduce poverty. The program's entry point is through their Study Circles whose facilitators are members of the community. They have discovered that engaging in simultaneous activity within communities has had a tremendous impact. As a matter of fact, at the last round, they had a waiting list of communities wanting to participate in the program. Jean reported that the program has a strong focus on systems, and an equally strong focus on accountability and results. Becky Kroll who served as the Evaluation Liaison said that the data collected from communities was then fed back to them. A chart was created that outlined the census data on poverty and the participation rate in Study Circles of those communities. The data/information was fed back quickly. The Study Circle poverty rates were not what people had hoped for, but receiving the data in a timely manner helped to energize the group.
Jerry Uribe talked about building capacity in organizations to move communities forward and informed participants that some key outcomes from the pilot are available at Prevailing in The Long Run Report. They found that six months after the program concluded, participants had a tendency to forget everything because they did not have a tradition of writing it down. Jerry then created a blog to be used as a tool http://communityblogs.us. Over 55,000 people have participated in this activity in some way, and in fact, the response has been far greater than initially anticipated. The outcomes being sought by the Horizons Program are at the community level. They are looking at what has changed; what is that impact; what are all those factors that are always changing? Are more businesses being created? Community wealth and individual wealth? Education? Jerry reported that a great deal of the evidence indicates that there is a lot of change. Becky added that at the individual level, folks are learning to pay attention to the infrastructure.
Kayva Yang and Bo Thao of Asian Americans/Pacific Islands in Philanthropy introduced participants to the National Gender and Equity Campaign that AAPIP has launched. The campaign will be piloting in both California and Minnesota and concluding in 2011. The focus of the Organizational Fellowship, with a commitment to long-term systemic change, is on developing leadership in organizations on multiple levels and as replicable models. The fellowship selection process began with working with 22 organizations to engage their communities in new ways. The process has been helpful to these organizations around being more reflective about who they are. The core elements for selection to the fellowship included a readiness to transform how they work with communities.
One of the questions asked was about what success would look like. Although, the initiative does not yet have an external evaluator, all of the tools or anatomies of a social justice anchor organization will be part of the evaluation process.
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Heart - values, identities - embark upon a journey and address needs
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Head - organizational policy and structures - where groups can identify more clearly the structure they choose
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Hands and Legs - where organizations choose to walk, link to communities, where they choose to build partnerships
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Backbone - organizational strength and how they sustain the work
A question that the often is raised is around collective leadership and cultural competency. There are those organizations who cannot just participate in the democratic process - participants who can also challenge. They are looking for evaluation tools for cultural competency as the program hopes to get to a deeper level of cultural competency.
10:45AM Break (15 Minutes)
B. Presenting multi-stakeholder and collective leadership approaches
Leadership in Action - The Annie E. Casey Foundation: The Leadership in Action Program is a results based leadership project that seeks to increase the percentage of children entering school ready to learn.
The program, which is about six years old now, was developed in response to a question: Why is change, for vulnerable children and families, so slow? Why are we not doing any better? The result of this program was that it turned the curve on an intractable social challenge. The program was is about moving to action in very quick cycles. A collaborative body was formed that demonstrated a commitment to the result. Donna added, that she preferred the term "extreme alignment to "collaboration." The organizations, agencies and individuals engaged in the program asked, "What can I give to achieve the desired result?" The high cost of development is a result of putting together the 'container piece' and the 'implementation team.' It takes at least one year to go from interest to implementation which can be difficult when it is a matter of urgency.
U Process: The U Process is a multi-stakeholder approach to systems change that engages participants in a collective process of analysis, problem solving and creative prototyping. The process has been used to address child malnutition in India and by Washington, DC funders to address HIV/AIDS.
12:00PM Break for Lunch (1 hour and 15 minutes - self-organizing lunch)
1:15PM Reconvene from Lunch
III. Morning Reflections
David Cournoyer welcome the group back after lunch and asked for their thoughts and reflections to the following two questions.
IV. Using a framework to identify the purposes of our leadership work
A. Introduction and overview of a framework for identifying and mapping the purpose of our leadership work.
Claire shared a "A Framework for Leadership Investment and Evaluation" that was developed with support from the United Way of Toronto, and was adapted based on a framework that Grantmakers for Effective Organizations published ("A Grantmakers Framework for Understanding Nonprofit Leadership Development", in Investing in Leadership, Vol. 1).
The Framework maps different purposes for investing in leadership development, suggests activities that are used to achieve those purposes, and identifies outcomes that are often desired by those who invest in leadership for that purpose.
B. Participant mapping exercise using the framework
Each program was asked to place stickies on the framework that indicate where they are currently investing in leadership and where they are considering investing in the future. After everyone placed their stickies, we debriefed about the process and where we saw gaps and synergies in our different approaches.
C. Group debriefing of the mapping exercise
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Where do we see interesting clusters or shared focus in the group?
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Where are there gaps?
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What insights does the map give us about our leadership development priorities and approaches?
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Is there anything that surprises you about the map?
One participant observed that there was an impetus to situate their organization everywhere, but the process forced them to think about the primary focus of their organization. The intentionality of the process resulted in a deeper crystalization of their work, observed another participant. Other participant comments:
- Did not have any difficulty in placing the program I am currently working with because the program itself is very clear about what it is accountable to/for
- It would have looked very different ten years ago - demonstrates the evolution of the focus of the work
- There appears to be more movement toward the collective option
- Surprised by the number of stickies placed on the outside quadrant
Resources provided prior to this meeting for the above exercise: 1) Preparation Guide for Framework; and Investment Framework
2:45PM Break (15 minutes)
V. A. Deepening our understanding about how to support leadership development for specific purposes. Small group work.
a. What did you learn from the presentations about program activities and outcomes that are related to this purpose?
b. As you consider your own leadership development efforts, what other activities build leadership capacity for this purpose?
c. Are there other outcomes you seek?
d. How have you evaluated these outcomes? Using what types of approaches and methods? What challenges have your encountered?
B. Large group debrief
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Has your thinking about the types of activities that would help you to achieve your purpose changed?
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Has your thinking about the types of outcomes you are seeking shifted or expanded?
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Have you discovered any new opportunities for collaboration?
VI. Closing Reflections
4:30PM Break and Walk to Reception
5:00PM-7:00PM Reception at the St. Paul Hotel
October 28th
8:30-9:00AM Arrive and enjoy a continental breakfast!
I. Welcome Back/Reflections
David Cournoyer opened the morning and welcomed participants and invited their reflections.
- Struggling between the link of individuals and communities - communities are composed of individuals - what is the nexus between individual and community?
- Attempting to enter through the collective.
- How to make strategic investments in the talent of staff so don't have to bring in from the outside - have people pair out in a give/get - placed in the role of what you might give and what you might get - people forget how much they have to give.
- Struggling with the link between investing in individuals and the outcomes for community - what is the nexus?
- Building leadership for community capacity - leadership is embedded in everything they do.
- Eliminate the distinction between volunteer and staff. How do we learn to support leadership in a more organic way?
- Importance of focuing on team and understanding where I am in the collective.
- People work together in informal ways to get things done in their communities.
- Formal teams vs. the discomfort with informal team that women excel at.
- What harm could we be dooing through leadership programs that anoint one individual? Open the paradigm.
- How do we support people to exercise leadership in their roles? Thinking about our responsibility in a group even when people are not "in charge."
- It is important to have context about world-view on leadership within different communities. Understanding those views is important for activating people in a democratic system (cultural competency) - understanding of a world-view would make a huge idfference in how one exercises and sees their leadership.
- Sharing leadership takes time.
- As we grapple with developing leaders in diverse communities, we need to think about what is culturally appropriate in different communities. Non-traditional leadership is only 'non-traditional' in the mainstream.
- Developing leaders outside dominant culture gives greater capacity to lead in multiple settings.
- Culturally versatile, not culturally competent.
- How do we challenge the dominant culture; and what is our role here in starting to do that? How do you honor your own leadership and operate in a different culture? How do we challenge the dominant paradigm of leadership? What would it mean to "open up" the leadership paradigm to support collective models of leadership?
- Reintroducing the notion of group leadership.
II. Consultative Sessions
A. Participants will be introduced to consultative session: how they are conducted, the purpose they serve and how they benefit all participants. Participants will hear about the various projects and self-select the one they want to support.
Mary Emery, North Central Regional Center for Rural Development: Talking about the notion of coaching and how it makes a difference in leadership capacity initiatives. How do we evaluate it? The evaluation approach they apply is called 'spotlight.' Coaching for community change and the role of coaching in change. In evaluating, shine the spotlight on specific aspects.
Sally Leiderman, Center for Assessment and Policy Development: Developing an online survey to gather data and stories about how leadership groups are currently addressing (or struggling to address issues related to privilege, racism and it components. Sally also said that if they could spend two days at a table, the survey would not be necessary.
Bo Thao, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy: They are embarding on an organizational fellowship and looking at what best to evaluate. How do you evaluate collective leadership? How do you evaluate culturally competent leadership?
David Cournoyer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation: They want to activate communities to develop healthy communities. Place based, a vision of success that communities need to own.
B. Large Group Sharing: Each consulting team lead will have five minutes to share highlights from their consultative session, e.g. what is the most important take away for you?
10:30AM Break (15 minutes)
III. Synthesis and Collective Meaning Making
A. Journaling: Participants to journal the following question - What have been the most important learning themes related to leadership development and evaluation strategies that increase the diversity, scale and impact of leadership work?
B. Small Group Work: Participants work in small groups to share what they have written about and look for common themes, points of agreement and divergence.
C. Large Group Debrief: Share observations about convergences around important themes and lessons about leadership development work.
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Dealing with conventional and unconventional
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How do you reward, make the case for this very different paradigm?
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How do you share?
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Dealing with the conventional and unconventional leadership
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How do we reward different paradigms?
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Show people models that have not been seen before
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Dominant paradigm and newer models - alternatives - transforming, are more complex
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What is the nature of leadership?
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Advocate for looking at results and outcomes collectively, and back away from how to attribute to a given program
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Attention to gender, race and culture can help to move us to more collective paradigm
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Economy and election appears to have resulted in a sense of readiness and urgency in communities - how do you seed it?
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Leadership in times of crisis requires the capacity of the collective
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Coming from a different paradigm - leadership is not a given; power is a given - what is the new paradigm?
D. Introduction to the Wikli as a shared documentation tool.
IV. Closing Reflections
A. Process Learning - What worked and what would you change?
B. Closing Reflections
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- Good Mix
- Introduction Exercise
- Presenations
- Smal and Large Group Work
- Pace and Community Counts
- Framework and Mapping
- Breadth of the Workteam
- Space
- Flexibility
- Bo's report
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- Shared understanding of what we mean by leadership
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12:15PM-1:00PM Lunch
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