RCLA scholars engage with leaders as co-researchers to reflect on their leadership successes, challenges and what they are learning through their work in order to develop insights and best practices from how leadership happens.
Executive Summary: Evaluation of the IIE West Coast Center's LDM Program
RCLA released the Executive Summary for its comprehensive participatory evaluation of the Institute of International Education (IIE) West Coast Center’s Leadership Development for Mobilizing Reproductive Health (LDM) Program. The LDM program helped develop and sustain leaders working on the front lines of family planning and health issues in Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Philippines. RCLA assessed the program using a Participatory Action Research methodology, which sought to both integrate the experiences of the Fellows, stakeholders and LDM staff and provide them with the opportunity to connect, collaborate and develop sustainable next steps.
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Creative Courage: Leadership Practices to Build Resilience and Vitality in Performing Arts Organizations
Leaders from presenting arts organizations across the US came together to focus on a shared question of critical importance: how can arts nonprofits build resilient missions and visions to adapt and thrive in unpredictable times? Together they generated a set of essential leadership practices that draw on experimentation, courage, values, and reconnecting with the artistic spark driving their work.
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Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion: Insights from Scholarship
By Sonia M. Ospina, Waad El Hadidy and Grisel Caicedo with Amanda Jones, April 2011
In a report released in partnership with National Urban Fellows, RCLA scholars examine recent research on leadership and diversity, with a focus on public service. They find that scholars are linking diversity with adaptability, arguing that learning how to build organizations that effectively leverage racial diversity can foster the leadership capacity to adapt to other kinds of diversity and thrive in an increasingly complex environment. Yet there is less agreement in the literature on just how to do that. Limited empirical research in the public service field has resulted in a dearth of evidence for what works, even two decades after the diversity agenda has become a focus for public service organizations.
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Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Public Service: A Review of Leadership Development Programs in the US
By Sonia M. Ospina, Waad El Hadidy and Grisel Caicedo with Amanda Jones, April 2011
One in three Americans are people of color, yet minorities occupy just one in six leadership positions in state and federal government, nonprofits and foundations. A new RCLA report offers a listing of leadership development programs at the regional and national levels that are dedicated to supporting leaders of color, committed to diversity and open to all public service leaders, or that focus on diversity management.
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Baby Boomers, Public Service and Minority Communities: A Case Study of the Jewish Community in the United States
By David M. Elcott, PhD, June 2010
In this report, Dr. David Elcott finds that most Jewish Baby Boomers see retirement as a time for work and service, not rest. But he argues that organizations serving ethnic or religious communities are unprepared to tap this potentially huge influx of talent and experience. Based on a nationwide survey of 34 metropolitan Jewish communities conducted in July 2009, the survey elicited the attitudes of more than 6,500 individual Baby Boomer respondents about their future plans for public service and civic engagement. In addition to analyzing the survey data, Elcott offers recommendations on how the Jewish community can find substantial pathways that will engage Baby Boomers in communal institutional life.
Training for Trainers: A Guide to Designing Interactive Trainings Using Popular Education Techniques
By Joan Minieri, March 2010
This RCLA handbook provides a step-by-step guide to designing trainings that engage participants in creative ways of learning. It includes fundamentals on different learning styles, the six steps for designing a training, facilitator tips for keeping participants energized, and a variety of sample activities. It is based on the Social Change Leadership Network's successful Trainings for Trainers.
Reflections on Social Justice Organizing and Leadership
By David Cohen, Margo Hittleman and Jennifer Dodge, December 2009
This report focuses on elements of organizing often overlooked in conventional discussions of models and methods. The authors examine the ways cultural practices and symbols can be important resources to strengthen cohesion, galvanize people to act for social justice, and serve as tools for liberation. They also explore the ways women-centered approaches place personal relationships and healing at the forefront of their work to have a transformational impact on both the public and personal lives of the people they organize.
When Workers Take the Lead: Leadership Development at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON)
By Nik Theodore, September 2009
This ethnography examines how a network of organizations that safeguard workers’ and immigrants’ rights engages in a collective enterprise to build and maintain leadership among workers and organizers, develop a critical consciousness among the day labor workforce, and unite day laborers as a force for social change.
Taking Back the Work: A Cooperative Inquiry into Leaders of Color in Movement-Building Organizations
By Angie Chan and Linda Powell Pruitt with Will Allen, Joyce Johnson, Ricardo Martinez, Reggie Moore, Richard Moore, Ai-Jen Poo, and Cidra Sebastien, June 2009
A group of leaders of color committed to social justice asked: How do we build, strengthen and sustain movement-building organizations led by people of color? Together they generated four strategies for community-based leaders of color to maintain the integrity of their work and remain accountable to communities, develop supportive relationships, deepen their understanding of race and educate others, and nurture new leaders.
Government, Private Sector and Civil Society for Sustainable Development: Toward a Collaborative Synergy in Latin America
RCLA and the AVINA Foundation conducted a comparative research initiative to identify, study and support the dynamics of collaboration among nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and the public sector. Based on this work with independent scholars in Colombia and Brazil, RCLA has developed practical recommendations on building sustainable cross-sector collaborations in Latin America.
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21st Century Women's Leadership
This report - the product of a partnership between the White House Project and RCLA - gives a glimpse into candid discussions among top women executives about leadership styles, ambivalence about ambition, and the role race plays as women confront not just a single glass ceiling but a series of challenges in "the labyrinth of leadership."
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RCLA Practice Notes are practical guides to facilitation tools, peer consulting strategies and techniques for leadership development work.
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Ethnographies offer in-depth, rich portraits of leadership within selected organizations and communities.
Cooperative Inquiry provides a framework for participants to use their own experience to generate insights around an issue that is of mutual concern. These reports document groups' processes and findings.