Christine Kwak

Valorie Johnson

English

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Kellogg Leadership for Community Change Online Newsletter   Fellows gain inspiration from each other in the ongoing struggle for change back home. Page 3March 2009 Vol. VI,  Issue 3KLCC Recharged:“Being able to catch up, bounce ideas off each other, andcontinue to strengthen our network of support was very ful-filling.” — Cody Buchanan, KLCC adult coach, Mi Casa Resource Center.Kellogg Leadership for Community Change online newsletter Page 2KLCC is a program of the  W.K. KelloggFoundation. For more information contact:gValorie Johnson, program director,Youth and Education; KLCC Session Ig Christine Kwak, program director,Philanthropy and Volunteerism; KLCC Session IIW.K. Kellogg FoundationOne Michigan Avenue EastBattle Creek, MI 49017-4058Phone: (269) 968-1611 Fax: (269) 968-0413g Dale Nienow, executive director,Center for Ethical Leadership1401 E. Jefferson St., Suite 505Seattle, WA  98122Phone: (206) 328-3020Fax: (206) 328-4570Editing & Production Services:Langhum Mitchell CommunicationsDesign by XLR8Studios, LLC 2009Visit us online at: www.klccleadership.org.❱ ON THE COVER: Session One and Two fellowsgathered in Isle of Palms,South Carolina, to reconnect,refresh and rededicate.g LEADING OFFReconnection is the key to organizational rejuvenation  . . . . . . . . .page 3g VIEW FROM HEREKLCC newcomer feels connected  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 5g BEST PRACTICESSocial media as a tool of sustainability  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 6g NEWS & NOTESNews from around the KLCC fellowships and beyond  . . . . . . . . . .page 7g KEEPING IT REAL  Protecting women and girls  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 9IN THIS ISSUERenewal has been one of the enduringthemes of KLCC over the years, whetherit be community renewal, organizationalrenewal, leadership renewal, or some combi-nation of these. A recent meeting at WildDunes Resort near Charleston, S.C., brought together KLCCfellows and affiliated personnel from grantee sites across thecountry who participated in Sessions One and Two. The gath-ering was filled with the spirit of renewal, which was felt bymany in attendance.“Everyone was excited to reconvene. Many, especially thosefrom Session One, expressed that being in that gatheringreenergized them,” says communications consultant CherylD. Fields, senior vice president, Langhum MitchellCommunications. Some fellows with the longest tenure expe-rienced frustration around what they saw as a typical patternof involvement on the part of members of the fellowship. Itseemed that many fellows came into a projectwith a high level of enthusiasm and involve-ment, played a certain role for a while, andthen moved along into other endeavors leavingthe group and the project behind in an atmos-phere of dissolution. Initially, that pattern had come to beviewed as a downside that left some questioning the sound-ness of investing so heavily in the KLCC process as a way ofachieving the community change work. However, once the group got together, it began to dawn onseveral members spontaneously that there is a natural ebband flow to the work, a season of involvement followed by aperiod of disengagement and reflection. The South Carolinagathering provided the forum for reengagement that is thenext natural and logical step where people come togetherwith a lot of experience under their belts and can speak fromKellogg Leadership for Community Change online newsletter Page 3Leading Off❱ KLCC fellows assembled with coordinating organization and W.K. Kellogg Foundation staff to examine wherethey have been and where they are heading.continued on page 4 4COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIPResurges in South CarolinaBy Anneliese M. BrunerKellogg Leadership for Community Change online newsletter Page 4places of deep knowledge. It was a rich demonstration of thevalue of getting together occasionally, even after the formalsessions have ended, to review the work from a moredetached perspective. Of course, all this high-level commu-nication interaction is possible because of the foundationalwork in trust building that is an integral part of each KLCCexperience. “The other thing that was refreshing was howquickly the trust that has been built over time pays off in asituation like this. [Also], the new people get in synch quick-ly,” Fields says.Among the traditional exercises such as peacemaking cir-cles and the world café, there was a standout exercisedesigned to help people consider their own problems fromanother vantage point. One person at a time, everyone relat-ed a particularly vexing problem for which they had beenunable to imagine a solution. After they stated the issue, oth-ers at the table threw out possible solutions or ways to lookat the problem. The person posing the problem had to listenwithout reacting to the others remarks. At the end of thequestion session, the person had the opportunity to respondto those that made them think most. Not being allowed torespond immediately forced the listener to hear a number ofdifferent ideas and questions before considering which weremost useful.W.K. Kellogg Foundation program directors Chris Kwakand Paula Sammons invited participants to a conversationon the topic of racial equity, a key emphasis of theFoundation’s new mission and strategy.  Foundation staffwere eager to hear what the fellows thought about issues ofracial equity as they relate to the topic of leadership and theFoundation’s future work. The conversation roused passionand key insights from participants based on their many yearsof doing race, civil rights and social justice organizing. Theseperspectives were deeply anchored in experience and will berecognized and honored as the Foundation continues tograpple with the issue of racial equity in its future program-ming. ▲Leading Off continued from page 3❱ Roca's Victor Jose Santana with Kellogg FoundationProgram Director Christine Kwak.New Mexico’s CommunityLearning Exchange uses sto-rytelling to banish barriers andto teach the importance ofplace.COMING ...Reconnecting wtih Session One fel-lows to provide the long-term view.also ...klccleadership.org.STAY INFORMED.Kellogg Leadership for Community Change online newsletter Page 5The View From HereFor Maurice Mitchell, it was a logical progression from hisrole as lead organizer at LIPC to attending the KLCCcross-session gathering in South Carolina in lateFebruary. During KLCC Session One, Mitchell’s organizationworked closely with CANY KLCC Buffalo’s Ceylane Meyers todevelop the model and curriculum for LIPC’s education cam-paign and leadership development strategies. “It seemedlogical for me to go as the staff member with the most knowl-edge overall of using [the KLCC] model and connecting to thefellows from this point forward. I was able to understandthrough the Buffalo work,” Mitchell says.Having previously become aware of the boundary crossingnature of the work, Mitchell eagerly anticipated learning first-hand how different regional applications played out in areaswith discrete demographics in their communities.“[The] thingthat I think was the most concrete piece was the idea of thenetwork and of doing cross-regional learning,” he says.Mitchell had special praise for Denver’s Mi Casa ResourceCenter with regard to their success in organizing and incor-porating youth programming. “We look at power and organiz-ing and challenging specific entities or politicians or corpora-tions to push our agenda along, although that may be toooppositional for some,” Mitchell says, “but we don’t doenough of the networking and storytelling and deliberationthat are central to their work.”Despite having to sometimes be contentious in his work,Mitchell profoundly appreciated entering into a group that hadbuilt meaningful relationships across regions, race, class andage. He was immediately struck with the feeling of being at areunion of people with a shared desire to create leadershipand change through a shared language.Of special interest to this KLCC-affiliated community organ-izer was the flat structure of the relationships between youthand adults. He cited generational differences as being a bar-rier that he often sees in his work, and expressed his desireand intention to create democratizing spaces where youthfeel comfortable expressing themselves. He would like toincorporate the model that he observed in action in SouthCarolina into his own organization. “I would say that overall,[attending the conference] reminded me of the fact that ourexperience in Long Island is a shared experience. … If I’mstruggling with this idea of how to get youth and adults towork together in a democratic way, a group in Colorado hasmade inroads in that conversation. KLCC creates the oppor-tunity to network across regions.” ▲Networking Across BoundariesI n 2004, the Buffalo office of Citizen Action ofNew York (CANY) was part of KLCC SessionOne and used the principles of collective lead-ership to lobby for educational and school reform inthe economically disadvantaged urban community.CANY’s Long Island affiliate, Long IslandProgressive Coalition (LIPC), was not activelyinvolved in Session One, but has since modeled itsleadership efforts on the Buffalo example. Recently,LIPC’s Maurice Mitchell attended his first KLCCgathering and shares his experiences as a newcomer.❱ Long Island Progressive Coalition’s Maurice Mitchellhopes to democratize intergenerational interactions with-in his organization using KLCC’s youth-adult partnershipmode.Kellogg Leadership for Community Change online newsletter Page 6In its quest to assess the possibilities for anexpansive vision for public media,American University’s Center forSocial Media (CSM) acknowledgesthe central importance of an open,“many-to-many” networkedmedia environment, thatwhich has replaced the top-down dissemination tech-nologies of the past. Theideal of an engaged pub-lic is at the heart of theCSM’s perspective onthe future of publicmedia, and its assess-ment of public mediaconsiders emergingtrends, stakeholdersand policies in publicmedia’s assumed mis-sion to educate, informand mobilize its users. To this end, CSM eachmonth selects one of itspartners in the GlobalPerspectives in a Digital AgeInitiative to highlight. Recently,CSM selected Native AmericanPublic Telecommunication’s (NAPT)newly launch Web site to review, andthe summary of how NAPT is using newtools to connect Native American media mak-ers could be informative for organizations trying to fig-ure out how to reach out to their existing as well as new com-munities and to mobilize them to action in pursuit of ongoingand evolving goals.A key component of the assessment was aligned withCSM’s central observation that “many-to-many” digital tech-nologies are fostering participation at unprecedented levelsin term of choice, conversation, curation, creation and col-laboration. For example, on February 12, 10,000 people in200 cities gathered under the banner of Twestival, a gather-ing organized on the social network Twitter, to have fun andto raise money for clean water efforts in Africa and India. Todate, more than $250,000 has been raised that will directlysupport clean water projects. The success of this effort clearly illus-trates the intersection betweensocial media and social activism,a dynamic topic in today’s dig-ital media climate. NAPT fitswell within this climatewhere it distinguishesitself as a new networkcreated exclusively forNative Americanmedia makers.Along with suchestablished fea-tures as a data-base of NativeAmerican film andlive streaming ofNative Americanradio, NAPT ‘s newnetworking facilityprovides a platformfor future collabora-tive projects. NativeAmerican writers, pro-ducers and directors canpost their latest work,upload their resumes andidentify working partners.In addition to the collaborativeopportunities that will arise fromNAPT’s interactive features, the organiza-tion will continue to make available grant opportu-nities in Native American media through which Native com-munities can expand the reach and impact of their mes-sages. The NAPT Public Television Program Fund is currentlyaccepting applications through July 15 for proposals for doc-umentary, performance, cultural and public affairs program-ming intended for national public television broadcast. Disenfranchised communities can either be the creators ofdemocratizing content using public or social media, or theycan be the beneficiaries of efforts by groups or communitieswho organize through social media outreach. More information is available at www.centerforsocialmedia.org;www.nativetelecom.org; and http://tinyurl.com/blo38v. ▲Best PracticesPublic Media Engages CommunitiesSource: Center for Social MediaSTAYINFORMED. klccleadership.org.Kellogg Leadership for Community Change online newsletter Page 7News & Notes— News & Notes is compiled by the KLCC Bridge editorial staff. Comments and future news brief items should be forwarded to info@klccleadership.org.South Texas Continues Advocacy WorkAs was reported in the July 2008issue of the KLCC BridgeNewsletter (p. 7), collectiveleadership work by individuals fromthe KLCC South Texas site, the LlanoGrande Center for Research andDevelopment, contributed to theissuance of $133,000,000 in educa-tion bonds for schools in the localarea. “The work of the bond oversightcommittee has really contributed tobuilding a new culture of participa-tion,” says Dr. Francisco Guajardo,Llano Grande’s executive director.In his role as professor of educa-tional leadership at the University ofTexas-Pan American, FranciscoGuajardo reports:“My students have become veryactive in policy advocacy work at thestate legislative level. Twenty-six ofthem testified during the summer of2008 before the Select Committeeon Public School Accountability, a leg-islative committee, and a number ofthem have drafted language for legis-lation. We don’t know if the proposedlegislation will make it into law, butthat’s not necessarily the point. Theyhave become policy activists andhave gotten a taste for how to impactpolicy. There’s no way to put a dollaramount on the work.”Over the course of the past month,the Llano Grande Center hasreceived grants in the amount of$110,000 to continue youth servicelearning work, as well as regional col-lege preparatory work. The efficacy ofthe work is enhanced through theapplication of the collective leader-ship model the Center has incorpo-rated since its cooperation with KLCCbegan in 2002. ▲❱ Francisco Guajardo, left, here meeting with KLCC colleagues, models collective leadership in his role as aneducator.continued on page 8 4Kellogg Leadership for Community Change online newsletter Page 8News & Notes continued from page 7Comments and news brief items should be forwarded toinfo@klccleadership.org.Public Media Innovation Project Accepting ApplicationsPublic Media Innovation isaccepting applications for fund-ing for a small number of edu-cation-oriented projects, in amountsfrom $5,000 to $50,000, which willsupport public broadcasting’s mis-sion to increase economic and finan-cial literacy. These small grants willhelp grantees produce new mediaeducation tools, applications andcontent to help youth and adult learn-ers understand and manage the cur-rent economic crisis. Proposals will be accepted untilmidnight April 17. In brief, CPB is hoping to selectprojects that:•Use new media techniques, strate-gies, applications or products to fos-ter economic and financial literacyand enhance understanding of thecurrent economic crisis •Include a broadcast component•Indicate potential to meet a com-pelling economic or financial educa-tional need•Indicate potential to have a positiveimpact on learning for a targetedaudience•Demonstrate an approach that canbe replicated by other stations•Demonstrate a promising struc-tured educational approach to betested.More information and the down-loadable Request for Proposals andCPB application are available atwww.publicmediainnovation.org. ▲Leadership Learning Community Creates SpaceThe Leadership Learning Community (LLC) is a nation-al organization that supports leadership develop-ment programs through funding, research and oper-ational avenues. LLC seeks to empower communities andorganizations to uphold positive change through compe-tent leadership development practices. To this end, LLC’sannual meeting, Creating Space IX, will tackle issuesaround achieving and sustaining social justice throughindividual and collective leadership expressed throughtransformative conversations in an atmosphere whereparticipants will be invited to:•Share innovative strategies for supporting social justiceleadership within and across programs, organizations andcommunities •Learn experientially through creative, multidimensionalactivities — including addressing emergent interests usingOpen Space •Exchange promising practices in the field of leadershipdevelopment •Be inspired to increase your own leadership impact •Renew and recharge body, mind and spirit •Develop and deepen peer networks and connections.Creating Space IX will take place in Oakland, Calif., fromMay 20-22.More information on the three-day gathering is availableat www.leadershiplearning.org/creatingspace9 where youwill find information on how to register and how to applyfor financial assistance. The Leadership LearningCommunity is funded in part by the W.K. KelloggFoundation. ▲Victor Jose Santana, educationcoordinator at Roca in Chelsea,Mass., will co-lead a circletraining from April 2 through April 4,at Roca’s facility located at 101 ParkSt., Chelsea, Mass. The peacemak-ing circle is a process that bringstogether individuals who want toengage in conflict resolution, heal-ing, support, decision making orother activities in which honest com-munication, relationship develop-ment and community building arecore desired outcomes. Circles offer an alternative to con-temporary meeting processes thatoften rely on hierarchy, win-lose posi-tioning, and victim-rescuerapproaches to relationships andproblem solving. Derived from nativeand aboriginal traditions, circlesbring people together in a way thatcreates trust, respect, intimacy,goodwill, belonging, generosity,mutuality and reciprocity.The process is not about changingothers, but rather is an invitation tochange oneself and one’s relation-ship with the community. Circlesintentionally create a sacred spacethat lifts barriers between people,opening fresh possibilities for con-nection, collaboration and mutualunderstanding. The process worksbecause it brings people together ina way that allows them to see oneanother as human beings and to talkabout what matters.—Victor Jose SantanaFor more information, contactBarbara Regan at (617) 889-5210 ext.241 or Barbara_Regan@rocainc.com.▲Peacemaking Circle TrainingKeeping it Real“The world community of women must not allow difficulteconomic times to distract our global leaders from end-ing the wars, feeding the people, and stopping the sys-temic sexual violence and horrific crimes committedagainst women and girls in every country — whether ina democracy or under another form of rule.”—Kim Gandy, president, National Organization for WomenKellogg Leadership for Community Change online newsletter Page 9❱ Women and girls in conflictregions are often victims ofstrategic sexual abuse.

Kellogg Leadership for Community Change Online Newsletter, March 2009

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Kellogg Leadership for Community Change Online Newsletter, March 2009

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