Collective Leadership Works: Preparing Youth & Adults for Community Change

This toolkit is intended to help build readiness for collective leadership. It provides concrete tips and practical activities for application in forming and strengthening the work of a community-change group. This toolkit is designed to be used by youth and adults who are interested in creating, leading, facilitating, or participating in asset-based community development, community building, or social justice efforts. These lessons are designed to benefit groups at any stage of development, from building readiness for collective leadership to strengthening existing relationships.

Collective Leadership Works: Preparing Youth & Adults for Community Change draws upon the collective experience, work, and spirit of the Kellogg Leadership for Community Change (KLCC) project, which invited communities across the United States (US) to explore the potential of collective leadership across traditional boundaries such as race, gender, culture, and class. Published by the Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development, this toolkit emerges from KLCC Session II: Valuing and Building Youth-Adult Partnerships to Advance Just Communities. From the spring of 2005 through the fall of 2007, youth and adults in organisations in 5 US communities worked together and forged relationships among themselves and with their communities.

The Innovation Center explains that any community change process generally includes 4 stages: building readiness, visioning and planning, implementation, and change and sustainability. This toolkit focuses on building readiness for community change, which is all about building relationships. The toolkit is based on the conviction that collective leadership has the ability to unite human, cultural, and technological resources so that local people come together to improve their communities for a common well-being. It is most often motivated by a sincere love of place - the leaders' community - and relationships formed around that love of place enable leaders to share their vision of and work toward a common vision. According to the Innovation Center, youth-adult partnerships play a critical part in collective leadership: The voice of youth gives adults a critical perspective and a source of creative energy, and adults bring to young people important experience and connections that help them transform their ideas into meaningful actions.

The toolkit addresses the following topics:

• Forming your social-change group
• Setting a solid foundation for strong youth-adult partnerships
• Knowing your community
• Coming together in creative ways
• Developing relationships, both individual and group
• Planning your course of action
• Sustaining your group and its work
• Spreading the word about your group

The toolkit's activities, tips, and handouts could be adapted for the classroom or for more structured learning environments. Concrete links to community experience, like those included in this toolkit, will enrich the learning experience.