Partners
RCLA is well known for its collaborative approach and genuine engagement with leaders in the field. Our work begins at the intersection of action and knowledge, talent and capacity, ideas and spaces, and scholarship and practice.
Whether partnering to co-produce new insight about leadership or co-designing a customized leadership development initiative, RCLA faculty, staff, fellows, and consultants are ready to work with you to solve real leadership challenges and to make social change - from the ground up.
We invite you to review examples of current and past partnerships in four areas of our work below and imagine how RCLA might be a resource for you. If you think RCLA can help your organization address a critical leadership challenge you face, please e-mail us. We look forward to hearing about your work.
Research & Documentation
Leadership Development
Convenings
Teaching & Training
Click here for a complete list of our partners.
Action ◦ Knowledge | Research & Documentation
LCW Research & Documentation Component
Through the Leadership for a Changing World (LCW) Research and Documentation effort, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, RCLA works with LCW awardees to create opportunities for co-researchers to observe and analyze their own experience, and share reflections about what makes their practice successful and what leadership challenges they confront. Through these activities we develop together new understandings of how social change leadership emerges and is sustained.
Teacher Mentors' Knowledge Project (Avi Chai)In 2006, the Avi Chai Foundation engaged RCLA to launch a collaborative project with Jewish New Teacher Project mentors to document the mentors' learning and unique perspectives. Findings were captured in a 2007 report titled
Experience Speaks: The Impact of Mentoring in the Classroom and Beyond, and further discussed and advanced during two convenings with Jewish day school administrators and mentors.
Talent ◦ Capacity | Leadership Development
The Academy of Child Safety (ACS)RCLA was commissioned to develop a training curriculum for the Administration for Children's Services Leadership Academy. The Leadership Academy was designed to provide approximately 250 Child Protective Managers with a hands-on leadership experience that challenges them to develop their leadership and management capacity, drawing on RCLA's deep understanding of best practices in four intersecting fields: child welfare, leadership, organizational change and adult learning.
The Talent Initiative (Edna McConnell Clark Foundation)The Talent Initiative is a partnership between the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, RCLA, and the Center for Applied Research. The Initiative engages grantees from the Clark portfolio, all high performing nonprofit organizations that serve low-income young people, in efforts to enhance their talent and leadership capacity and build knowledge about what it takes to move organizations toward high performance.
Ideas ◦ Dialogues | ConveningsLeading Large-Scale Change, NYC& Albany Series (Accenture)Accenture and RCLA have developed a breakfast series for public sector managers to discuss in depth the multiple managerial and leadership challenges of implementing large-scale change. Each breakfast includes senior managers as lead discussants and a moderator who encourages lively conversation exploring a central strategic and managerial question of particular relevance to large-scale change efforts.
Emerging Approaches to Inquiry Conference (CARPP)
At the 2008 conference, RCLA and the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice (CARPP) will seek to explore some of the issues researchers in both Centers have noticed in engaging with varieties of qualitative and action research approaches, including cooperative inquiry, narrative inquiry and learning history. The conference aims to build a community of inquiry, emphasizing conversation and experimentation rather than presentation and listening, through workshops, World Café and Open Space.
Scholarship ◦ Practice | Teaching & TrainingGovernment, Private Sector and Civil Society for Sustainable Development: Towards a Collaborative Synergy in Latin America (AVINA)
AVINA, a Latin American organization that supports business and civil society collaborations for sustainable development, has partnered with RCLA to design and implement a comparative initiative in Colombia and Brazil aimed at identifying, supporting and studying the dynamics of inter-sector collaboration among public sector, business and nongovernmental organizations. RCLA has trained participants in both Colombia and Brazil on the participatory method and cooperative inquiry, and has provided technical assistance to the cooperative inquiry facilitators and groups. This rigorous, practice-oriented initiative blends action, collaborative inquiry and more traditional research in order to understand and promote inter-sector collaboration.
NYU Undergraduate Course: The Meaning of Leadership (developed and taught by Frances Kunreuther, RCLA Senior Fellow)*
RCLA Senior Fellow Frances Kunreuther has developed a unique course for undergraduate NYU students which examines the meaning of leadership by looking at the impact of history, culture and circumstance on how we define and identify leadership. Students study different models of leadership, hear presentations from leaders in business, nonprofits and government, and examine their own leadership styles. Over the course of the semester, they become familiar with the different ways that leadership is viewed, and develop the skills to critically examine different leadership styles in others and in themselves.
*Teaching that emerges from RCLA work happens mostly at NYU.
