Leadership Learning Community

 

 

Funders and Evaluation Circle Meeting

 

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 in St. Paul, MN

 

Funders and Evaluators Meeting Objectives:

 

• To learn from innovations in leadership support strategies that have the potential to expand the scope, cultural relevance, and impact of our efforts

• 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

• 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

 

October 27th, 9:00AM

 

I.    Opening

A. Welcome

B. Introductions of Participants

C. Review Meeting Outcomes and Agenda

 

II.   Mapping our Work

A. Introduction to a Leadership Investment and Evaluation Framework

B. Participants will map their own leadership work using the framework

C. Debriefing the mapping exercise: Where do we see interesting clusters or shared focus in the group; where are there gaps; what insights does the map give us about our leadership development priorities and approaches?

 

10:30 Break (15 minutes)

 

III.   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:

A. 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.

a. How is community capacity developed?

b. How is the  program scaling up to reach hundreds of communities?

c. How is the program using social media tools (e.g. community blogging) to increase connectivity and track progress towards outcomes?

 

B. 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.

a. How can we engage in ways that produce big impacts?

b. Who needs to be engaged and supported to generate and implement new solutions that can affect large scale change?

c. What kind of timeframe do we need to have for seeing results?

 

12:30 Break for Lunch (1 hour)

 

2:30 Break (15 minutes)

 

IV.    Deepening our understanding about how to support leadership development for specific purposes.

A. Break into small groups around 4-5 particular purposes for developing leadership

B. Consider the following questions:

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?

C. Large group debrief

 

V.     Closing Reflections

 

4:30 Break

 

5:00PM-7:00PM    Reception at the St. Paul Hotel

 

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October 28th

  

8:30-9:00AM  Arrive and enjoy a continental breakfast!

 

I.     Welcome back/Reflections

A. What new insights or questions have emerged?

 

II.    Consultative Sessions:

This part of the meeting will focus on learning application.  We will divide into teams that wiill apply lessons:

 

10:45 Break (15 minutes)

 

III.   Synthesis and Collective Meaning Making

Identification of major themes and lessons for capture on a meeting wiki.

 

IV.   Closing Reflections

 

12:00-1:00  Lunch