Everyone Leads E-Book

Paul Schmitz

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Based on a proven leadership model, Everybody Leads shows how leadership can be found in uncommon places and reveals how to inspire and cultivate the leadership of those focused on social change. It shows how to take responsibility to work with developing leaders to make a difference and outlines the five key leadership values. Sponsored by Public Allies, the book helps leaders to connect across cultures, facilitate collaborative action, recognize and mobilize all of a community's assets, continuously learn, and be accountable to those they work with and those they serve. Register at www.josseybass.com/emailfor more information on our publications, authors, and to receive special offers.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Endorsements

Logo

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Overview of the Chapters

Part One: About Public Allies and the Concept that Everyone Leads

Chapter 1: Coming to the Conviction That Everyone Leads

Our Mission: Changing the Face and Practice of Leadership

The Story of Public Allies

Chapter 2: My Leadership Journey

Starting Out

If I Can, So Can You

Chapter 3: The Tradition and Future of the Concept That Everyone Leads

Leadership from the Community Up: History and Current Trends

Everyone Leads: A Survey of Recent Leadership Theory

The Bottom Line: Everyone Can Lead and Practice Leadership Values

Chapter 4: The Responsibility of Leadership

Stepping Up

Working with Others

The Responsibility Virus

The Five Core Values

Part Two: The Five Core Public Allies Leadership Values

Chapter 5: Recognizing and Mobilizing All of a Community's Assets

The Proverbial Glass: Half Empty and Half Full

Identifying and Mobilizing Assets

Two Solutions, Two Paths

Abundant Communities

Applying the Model at Public Allies

The Cornerstone Value

Chapter 6: Connecting Across Cultures

E Pluribus Ouch!

Diversity

Power, Privilege, and Oppression

Inclusive Leadership

Chapter 7: Facilitating Collaborative Action

Awareness of Self and Others

Building Teams

Collective Impact

Chapter 8: Continuously Learning and Improving

Creating an Effective Learning Environment and Community

Individual Development, Coaching, and Feedback

Critical Reflection and Presentations of Learning

Chapter 9: Being Accountable to Ourselves and Others

Being True to Ourselves

Being Accountable to Those We Work With

Being Accountable to Those We Serve

Being Accountable to Those Who Came Before Us

True Integrity

Afterword

Notes

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Afterword

The Author

Public Allies

Index

Endorsements

“In Everyone Leads, Schmitz provides leaders and organizations with innovative ideas about how to make a greater difference in their communities, as he has done with Public Allies.”

—Sonal Shah, former director, White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation under President Barack Obama

“Grounded in our core American values and informed by current technological and social trends, Everyone Leads makes a powerful call for citizen leadership, with inspiring stories and practical steps we all can take on the issues we care about.”

—David Eisner, CEO, National Constitution Center, and former CEO, Corporation for National and Community Service under President George W. Bush

“Everyone Leads challenges leaders and organizations to think in new ways about how we lead. It calls on us to see our effectiveness not just in the achievement of goals, but in the values we practice and the people we engage as we achieve them. Schmitz has issued a call to action well worth heeding—bravo!”

—Dr. Cheryl Dorsey, CEO, Echoing Green

“We have long admired how Public Allies discovers one of our community's most untapped assets: young people, especially those not often seen as potential leaders. We hope many more will join them in building these assets.”

—John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann, co-founders, Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University

“Public Allies has proven again and again that young people have tremendous potential to lead when given the opportunity. This book will be an indispensable resource for campus programs and students who want to get involved in working for community change.”

—Liz Hollander, former CEO, Campus Compact, and senior fellow, Tufts University

“Universities are essential to ‘building leadership from the community up.’ As community stakeholders, educational institutions must be contributors, collaborators, problem solvers, and learners. There is no room for ivory tower musing; rather, we educators must put our privilege to work and engage in action research that invites co-creating solution-oriented pathways with community members. Everyone Leads provides the inspiration, optimism, and hopefulness needed to mobilize community assets. The message is that together, people can and must be change agents.”

—Dr. Patricia Arredondo, associate vice chancellor and dean of the School of Continuing Education, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Copyright © 2012 by Paul Schmitz. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schmitz, Paul, date.

Everyone leads: building leadership from the community up/Paul Schmitz.—1

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-90603-3 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-12072-9 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-12073-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-12074-3 (ebk)

1. Leadership. 2. Community leadership. I. Title.

HM1261.S365 2012

303.3′4–dc23

2011033498

Preface

Writing this book has been one of the greatest professional experiences of my life. Several other authors told me how hard it would be, and they were right. The book has taken much more time than I thought it would, and the writing has evolved in ways I did not imagine when I wrote the original outlines. I've spent countless hours reflecting on and processing years of lessons about leadership, communities, values, and my own leadership journey.

At the end of each program year, our Allies participate in a Presentation of Learning, where they demonstrate before an audience of peers, Public Allies staff, and other leaders how they have learned and practiced our leadership values and describe how they will continue doing so in the future. This book is my Presentation of Learning after eighteen years with Public Allies. And these eighteen years have been an incredible learning experience.

I love my job. Every day, I get to help a diverse and talented group—young people who have a passion for making a difference—begin their careers working for community and social change. I know that as Public Allies helps them step up and lead, they will help others step up, too. Our alumni cascade our impact through communities. Our staff has firsthand knowledge of what an incredible privilege it is to participate in this transformation. And of course we ourselves are transformed.

Just as Public Allies has been my university, our staff, our Allies, our partners, and our mentors have been my teachers.

To the Allies—past, present, future—and staff of Public Allies, who inspire me and offer us all hope for the future

To those who have contributed to my own leadership journey, especially to the memory of those beloved mentors who have passed—Jimmy, Charlie, Lisa, and Uncle Jim

And to Olivia, Maxwell, Maya, and Jennifer, whose love inspires me to be my best and do my best each day

Acknowledgments

As I conducted research for this book, I increasingly realized that the philosophy, practices, and stories behind the Public Allies program have been handed down by oral tradition. Much of the practical information about how to deliver our program has been documented, but our reasons for delivering our program the way we do have not been well documented. As a result, I needed more time to prepare the book—and was presented with an amazing opportunity. I got to interview dozens of Allies, staff, and alumni across the country, and to read many stories and examples compiled by others. Therefore, I first must thank all of you whose stories have shaped this book and animated our approach. Thanks also to those of you whose stories do not appear here—trust me, your stories will be told in other ways. All of you have inspired me, again and again, and made me so proud to lead Public Allies.

The great historian Sean Wilentz, describing how Bob Dylan has taken melodies, quotes, stories, and images from various literary, artistic, and musical traditions and transformed them into something new, defends this practice, saying that “every artist is, to some extent, a thief; the trick is to get away with it by making … something new.”1 Our staff has done the same thing over the years, and I thank all the people, named and unnamed, who influenced, inspired, and taught various members of the Public Allies community as we built our leadership approach and curriculum. Our unique approach is grounded in the work of many amazing leaders.

I was able to write this book because of the support of Public Allies' board of directors, management team, and staff. I must begin by acknowledging that my growth as a leader, along with the growth of Public Allies, has been most enabled by the leadership of our board chair, Bill Graustein. Bill is a community builder and philanthropist in Connecticut, and he is perhaps the greatest exemplar I know of our values and our community-building approach. I am truly blessed to have this thoughtful, humble, intellectually deep, loving leader as Public Allies' chair, largest donor, and role model. He put the “angel” in “angel investor.”

Along with Bill, I also thank the other board members whose support of this project allowed me to dedicate the immense time and patient attention it required: David Benjamin, Claire Bennett, Melia Dicker, David Eisner, Leif Elsmo, Katherine Gehl, Liz Hollander, Richard Murphy, Julian Posada, Christa Robinson, Jason Scott, Kanwar Singh, Michael Smith, Dorothy Stoneman, and Jaime Uzeta. I am so grateful to work for you.

There is no way I could have even started this book without having Cris Ros-Dukler as my COO. Cris and I lead the organization in a partnership that has been very positive for the organization. In Chapter Eight, I share a list of things that I suck at. Cris is really good at most of those things, and her leadership has strengthened the organization. We work with a terrific management team: Enrique Ball, vice president of marketing and development; Tim Hosch, vice president of finance and administration; and David McKinney, vice president of programs. Together, they have led Public Allies to quality, growth, and learning while staying true to our mission and values. I also thank Nelly Nieblas, our director of external relations and public policy, and, again, Enrique Ball for their patience and the extra effort they made in areas where we work together while I was writing this book. And I must especially thank my super assistant, Melinda Rodriguez. I am so fortunate to have her steady, positive, warm, professional support; her own life and leadership inspire me. It is so great to have Cris and Melinda, such powerful, smart, caring, fun women, as my closest co-workers.

Diane Bacha, our director of communications, worked with me on every aspect of the book, and her contributions are everywhere. She helped me edit every page, brainstorm ideas, collect stories, coordinate edits and feedback from early readers, master the publisher's style guide, and do the difficult work of securing permissions from all the sources cited here. This book is much better because of her incredible help.

I must also thank all the readers who reviewed early drafts of the chapters and sent us useful edits, feedback, and suggestions that have made the book better and will make it more relevant to its audience. Thanks to MacArthur Antigua, Heidi Brooks, Dana Burgess O'Donovan, Max Chang, Bob Francis, Bill Graustein, Ava Hernandez, Liz Hollander, Asha Loring, Marc McAleavy, David McKinney, Jeanette Mitchell, Joanne Murphy, Richard Murphy, Cris Ros-Dukler, Jason Scott, Michael Smith, Jaime Uzeta, Fahd Vahidy, James Weinberg, Todd Wellman, and Harris Wofford.

I thank and forgive Jesse Wiley, and I hope he forgives me, too. Jesse is the editor responsible for initiating this project, and occasionally during the last nine months, when I was at the height of frustration or stress, I took his name in vain. I must also thank the people for whom I caused stress and frustration: Vince Hyman, Dani Scoville, and Alison Hankey. Vince was my coach and editor, and he stayed patient and persistent as a four-month project extended to nine months. He used my guilt as a tool but never exploited it, and his edits, feedback, and suggestions were enormously helpful; he is a real pro. Dani Scoville helped us get all our ducks in a row on the way to the finish line. Xenia Lisanevich and Xavier Callahan caught all my mistakes and made very thorough and helpful edits. Alison Hankey, another real pro, managed the project in a way that allowed me to revise the timeline and the project itself to make this, I believe, a much better book.

It would be impossible to thank everyone who has ever been associated with Public Allies and made a difference in my life and my leadership. Nevertheless, along with my current team, I must also thank Tony Allen, Sheila Bernus-Dowd, Craig Bowman, Tony Brown, Katrina Browne, Omar Brownson, Mike Canul, Patrick Carroll, Dan Condon, Julius Davis, Michelle Dobbs, Magda Escobar, Ian Fisk, Merilou Gonzales, Patricia Griffin, Patrick Griffin, Peter Hart, Chris Hero, Jay Kim, Vanessa Kirsch, Wendy Kopp, Edward Minter, Karen Mulhauser, Jojopa Nsoroma, Michelle Obama, Jason Scott, Trabian Shorters, Tavis Smiley, Chuck Supple, Suzanne Sysko, Kimberly Tuck, Kristin Venderbush, David Weaver, Tim Webb, Brian Young, and Josh Zepnick.

I stand on the shoulders of many giants. I have been mentored and supported by so many leaders, and I have benefited greatly from their wisdom, love, and support. Again, it is hard if not impossible to thank everyone, but I'll try. Thanks to Dan Bader, Bill Boletta, Charlie Bray, Dana Burgess O'Donovan, Daniel Cardinali, Patrick Corvington, Cheryl Dorsey, Jim Forbes, Bob Francis, Katie Gingrass, Leslie and Mike Grinker, Darrell Hammond, Reuben Harpole, Father James Hoff (Uncle Jim), Michele Jolin, Jody Kretzmann, Wayne Lawrenz, John McKnight, Jeanette Mitchell, Beth, Jim, and Joanne Murphy, Brent Rupple Jr., Sonal Shah, Jerry Shepard, Tom Sheridan, Jo and Mimi Spiro, James Stearns, Linda Stephenson, Lisa Sullivan, Marta Urquilla, James Weinberg, the Welland family, Shelley Whelpton, Harris Wofford, and my old friends from the Cosmic Corner.

I must also thank my parents and my family. As you will see in Chapter Two, I was a difficult child, and we had many conflicts, but we pulled through it all together. I want especially to thank my mom for reading Chapter Two, discovering many things for the first time, and telling me she was proud of me for sharing my story.

My time and my work on this book were supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Thank you to Anne Mosle and Kara Carlisle for their generous support and their belief that Public Allies' work is worth sharing. I also must thank some of those whose support has been most important to our growth. Suzanne Aisenberg, formerly of the Atlantic Philanthropies, and Robert Sherman, formerly of the Surdna Foundation, were instrumental in helping me as a new CEO lead Public Allies' second wave of growth. Thanks also to Christine Kwak, Tom Reis, and Lisa Flick Wilson of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation; to David and Cheryl Einhorn and Jennifer Hoos Rothberg of the Einhorn Family Foundation; to Josh and Anita Bekenstein; to Kippy Joseph of the Rockefeller Foundation; to Alison Yu of the William Randolph Hearst Foundation; to Shawn Dove and Mimi Corcoran of the Open Society Institute; to Richard Brown and Christine Rhee of American Express; and to Doug Jansson and Jim Marks of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation (my first believers).

Most of this book was written at Alterra Cafes in Milwaukee. I thank their great employees for giving me a place to plug in, drink, and eat. As I comfortably wrote for hours and hours while blasting Wilco, Radiohead, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and others through my headphones, I always felt welcome.

And, finally, my children—Olivia, Maxwell, and Maya—bring great joy, love, and magic to my life every day. I couldn't possibly love them more or be more proud of them. I am the luckiest dad in the world. And I am also very lucky to have found Jennifer Frank and her wonderful children, Eli and Nora. I'm passionate about work-life balance, and I had to make sacrifices on each side as I completed the book. I am better at my work because I take the time to treasure the love, care, and support I have from Jennifer, my kids, and so many family members, friends, and mentors. Growing up, I never could have imagined the career I have or the love and support I have in my life today. I am very grateful.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Paul Schmitz

August 2011

Introduction

Everyone leads. When I began using this phrase in presentations about Public Allies and chose it as the title of this book, it provoked many questions and debates from people outside the organization.

Some asked if we really meant everyone. “Can everyone really lead?” they asked. “Or are you just talking about a certain group of people? Don't you agree that people have different levels of skills, and that some people just aren't meant to be in charge? Aren't there people who don't want to be in charge?”

Others questioned whether anything can get done if everyone feels that he or she is in charge: “Don't you have a problem with too many people feeling entitled? Do you mean that everyone has a say about everything? How is it possible to get clear direction or consensus if everyone believes that he or she is a leader? Don't you need better followers, too?”

I have found a simple and powerful way to answer these critics by reframing the idea of leadership, moving from an emphasis on the noun leader to an emphasis on the verb to lead. At Public Allies, we talk about leadership in terms of an action one takes, not in terms of a position one holds. Leadership is about taking responsibility—both personal and social—for working with others on shared goals. Everyone has some circle of influence where it is possible to take responsibility for leading. It is also important how one leads, and leadership includes the values one uses to bring people together around shared goals. In other words, the means are as important as the ends. Leadership is not about a position that one is entitled to have; it is about a process in which one takes responsibility to engage. Depending on the goal, group, or task, we may sometimes be leading and sometimes be following.

I've found our lessons on leadership occasionally supported in unlikely places. Not long ago, for example, my children and I watched the Pixar animated film Ratatouille, and I was surprised to see that it captured our philosophy of leadership well. In the film, a rat named Rémy dreams of being a chef. He journeys to the Paris restaurant owned by his greatest inspiration, Auguste Gusteau, an author and the TV host of Everyone Can Cook. Rémy allies himself with a hapless errand boy, Alfredo Linguini, hiding in Alfredo's toque blanche and guiding him to become a master chef. Drama and comedy ensue, and the film ends with a cynical and vicious critic, Anton Ego, declaring Rémy the greatest chef in all of France. Having long disdained Gusteau's claim that everyone can cook, Ego now says, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” In the same way, Public Allies during the past two decades has seen at first hand how great leadership can emerge from uncommon places.

This does not mean that everyone can lead any effort, organization, or institution, or that one who is a good leader in one context is a good leader in other contexts. It does mean that a great leader can come from anywhere, and that unless more people believe in themselves, take responsibility, and work with others to make a difference, we all lose out from the lost potential. At Public Allies, we have developed the leadership qualities of more than 3,800 diverse young adults, from ex-felons and teen parents to graduates of top colleges. There is an incredible amount of idealism, energy, passion, and intelligence in our communities that is overlooked and unharnessed. We need more of these talented community members to step up and lead.

But leadership is often defined as something out of reach for ordinary people. Too often, leadership stories focus on the heroic journeys of famous leaders. And too many people associate leadership with those in positions of power, ignoring the power that diverse individuals have to make a difference. This incomplete definition of leadership causes us to overlook the real leadership stories that are woven through our history. No one who saw Ben Franklin arrive in Philadelphia with nothing more than a loaf of bread to his name would have imagined who this poor printer's apprentice would become. E. D. Nixon and other residents of Montgomery, Alabama, also did not know what to expect of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the twenty-six-year-old preacher they chose to be the public leader of their bus boycott. Leadership emerging from humble beginnings is a common narrative throughout our nation's history, whether in social movements, politics, or business. But stories of social change that focus only on the role of heroic leaders are incomplete. Social change has always been the result of ordinary people doing extraordinary things—the courageous acts of many, not just the heroic acts of a few. In this book, I provide examples from the American Revolution and the civil rights movement of how the leadership of many unsung citizens contributed to some of our most important social changes. We need to identify and build more such leaders. When we fail to engage the talent indigenous to our communities, we can't create sustainable change.

Most leadership books today are about how leaders build effective organizations. This one is about how to build effective communities. The lessons here can also apply to organizational effectiveness and management, but our focus at Public Allies has been on how leaders can work in any community to bring diverse individuals and groups together to achieve common goals. There's a good reason for this focus: we see many well-run organizations that demonstrate measurable results in addressing educational, health, or economic needs, but we don't see change in the community's overall results. For example, we see a large after-school program claim that it has helped thousands of young people improve their academic performance, but citywide test scores and graduation rates don't rise. We believe that this is so because such isolated efforts fail to inclusively engage the assets of diverse community members and groups. They fail to enlist collaboration across the many systems that influence the desired outcomes. The evidence is clear: to solve persistent community challenges, it is not enough to build more effective organizations. We need to build more effective communities, and our five core values—recognizing and mobilizing community assets, connecting across cultures, facilitating collaborative action, continuously learning and improving, and being accountable to those one works with and those one serves—help leaders do just that. In this book, you will read inspiring stories about leaders from a wide array of backgrounds who are practicing these five core values to build stronger communities.

Everyone Leads describes how Public Allies sees leadership, and it grounds our theory not just in stories but also in practical examples that will help any leader or emerging leader step up and be effective. Our definition of leadership has three parts:

1. Leadership is an action many can take, not a position that only a few can hold.

2. Leadership is about taking personal and social responsibility to work with others for common goals.

3. Leadership is about the practice of values that engage diverse community members and groups in working together effectively.

Overview of the Chapters

Chapter One begins with background information about Public Allies and how we came to the conviction that everyone leads. The chapter describes our program, tells the story of Public Allies' founding and growth, and explains how we developed our definition of leadership. The chapter also makes the case for why our leadership values are so important in solving some of the most pressing problems in our communities, and it includes stories of some inspiring Public Allies graduates who represent the potential in our communities.

Chapter Two is my own story, the story of how I as a leader came to my passion for Public Allies and to our leadership approach. My journey demonstrates why I believe that we must look for leadership potential everywhere, and why I believe that the core values of Public Allies are so important. I hope my personal journey can serve as an inspiration because, as I often say to the Allies, “If someone like me can do this, you can, too.”

Chapter Three is the theoretical heart of the book. It connects our definition of leadership to America's democratic history, to our country's movement history (especially the civil rights movement), and to emerging trends. The chapter also includes a survey of some of the most influential leadership books of the past four decades, showing that scholarship in the field has consistently made the case for leadership as a process in which many people can engage, as an assumption of responsibility for working with others around common goals, and as the practicing of values that engage people in working together effectively.

Chapter Four is about the responsibility of a leader. In fact, the first step in leadership is to take responsibility for acting with others to make a difference. Leadership is often a calling, and it often requires us to take risks, push beyond our own capacity, and make bold promises. But we must also be responsible for how we lead because another requirement of leadership is that we inspire, influence, and engage others.

Each of the remaining five chapters covers one of Public Allies' leadership values.

Chapter Five is about recognizing and mobilizing assets. It begins with the idea that, like the proverbial glass, each one of us is both half full and half empty, and so is each of our communities. Yet many leaders in communities are working from a belief that leaders are full, that communities are empty, and that leaders must fill communities' emptiness. This approach has many negative consequences for communities, and it does not lead to sustainable solutions. We all have strengths and shortcomings, and when we understand ourselves to be half-full, half-empty people working with other half-full, half-empty people, we create the opportunity for transformative relationships and work.

Chapter Six tackles diversity and inclusion. The chapter begins with a powerful insight that I gained from another Ally: that diversity embodies an action, not an ideal. Diversity is not just something you believe in. It is something you act to bring about, and your results matter. The chapter then moves on to an explanation of how our program works to build inclusive leadership among our very diverse Allies. The chapter describes how we introduce our Allies to each other, how we build a learning community where they can safely take risks and push each other, how we help Allies analyze issues (such as power, privilege, and oppression and ways of dismantling them), and how we use Allies' increasing awareness and confidence to help them become inclusive leaders. This work can be difficult, but inclusive leadership can also be inspiring and joyful and can lead to more effective results.

Chapter Seven describes our approach to facilitating teamwork and collaboration. Leadership is an inherently collaborative act. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence regarding others are the foundations of effective teamwork and collaboration. It is important for teams to use intentional processes that allow people to acknowledge and explore differences in work styles, leadership styles, and communication styles and build more authentic relationships. Collaboration is also the key to solving community problems. No one leader or organization can change a community. Change requires individuals and groups to be brought together across boundaries.

Continuous learning and improvement is the topic of Chapter Eight. Leaders, in order to grow their practice of leadership and inspire others to grow theirs, must take responsibility for their own learning and improvement. This chapter describes what Public Allies has learned about creating effective learning environments, curricula, and communities. It describes some of our processes for helping leaders give and receive feedback, acquire coaching, reflect on their practice, and take responsibility for their growth.

Chapter Nine discusses integrity and accountability. As leaders, we must be accountable to ourselves and others. We must be true to our own stories, purposes, values, and moral and ethical standards. Accountability to others begins with our responsibility for our promises and relationships, and it includes accountability to the people we serve—their interests must come first. We are also accountable to those who have inspired, influenced, taught, and mentored us.

In addition, as the Afterword describes, integrity is about putting all the pieces together—about how our five core values work together in one system for leading effectively. I hope that by the time you are reading the Afterword you share our conviction and are more aware of your own purpose, values, and potential.

The practices described in this book will help you better engage diverse people and groups to work effectively together because that is really the essence of what leaders do. We face an abundance of challenges—poverty, inadequate or failing schools and social services, limited access to healthy environments and lifestyles, and limited access to health care, to name just a few—that continue to cause suffering for too many of our fellow citizens. No one leader or group can solve these problems. We need many more leaders in all parts of our communities to step up and address injustice, working together across social and ideological differences and across professions and sectors. We really are the ones we have been waiting for. Everyone leads!

Part One

About Public Allies and the Concept that Everyone Leads

Chapter 1

Coming to the Conviction That Everyone Leads

Peter Hoeffel

Peter Hoeffel was working at a downtown Milwaukee deli, putting his philosophy degree from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee to work making sandwiches. One day, an energetic and friendly young African American woman walked into the shop and asked if she could hang a poster in the window to recruit young adults for Milwaukee's Public Allies program. Peter struck up a conversation and learned that she was looking for young people who were passionate about making a difference and who wanted to turn that passion into a career.

Peter, who was twenty-seven years old at the time, heard his calling. “I wanted to make the world a better place,” he says. “I didn't feel like too many places were looking to hire someone with a philosophy degree and a minor in Africology. I wanted to stop just talking about the social change that my friends and I would discuss, and Public Allies seemed like a great place for me to learn how to do just that.”1

He applied to Public Allies, was accepted, and participated in weekly leadership training at Public Allies while serving full-time at Legal Action Wisconsin. He discovered that he had a passion for people with disabilities, and over the next decade he grew his impact, helping lead a coalition of disability rights groups and eventually leading the Milwaukee chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. There he turned around a financially struggling agency and, through collaborations, expanded its services to the underserved African American and Latino communities that had previously been neglected.

Bizunesh Talbot-Scott

When Bizunesh Talbot-Scott applied to Public Allies, she was an eighteen-year-old single mom with a two-year-old son and was studying at Milwaukee Area Technical College. As an Ally, she worked for the Youth Leadership Academy, providing academic support and life skills to young African American boys.

Biz was young and immature, but she was also vivacious, ambitious, and smart. She gained focus through the program: “I was a smart girl who had no idea of my potential before Public Allies.”2

After her term was finished, she enrolled at Marquette University, where she excelled, and then at the University of Michigan Law School, where she was elected to the law review. After graduating, Biz moved to Washington, D.C., where she clerked for a federal judge and worked at the prestigious Skadden Arps and Patton Boggs law firms.

One day, a representative from Skadden Arps called Public Allies to make a donation on behalf of one of its associates. That associate was Biz, who was being honored because of her volunteer work in her community, especially at the Legal Aid Society in D.C. Later, during the transition to the Obama administration, Biz was appointed by the National Bar Association to chair the initiative to increase the number of African American attorneys serving in government, and she led a similar project for the National Congress of Black Women. She is now one of the staff leading presidential personnel at the White House.

Frank Alvarez

Frank Alvarez is busy. He directs a YouthBuild Program in Los Angeles that creates opportunities for youth who have left school without a diploma, have been incarcerated, or are otherwise disconnected from education and work. YouthBuild participants learn job and leadership skills while building affordable housing in their communities. Frank has also maintained a 3.7 grade-point average at Los Angeles Trade and Technical College, majoring in community planning and economic development while raising his daughter.

Frank describes his own path to this place: “In my family, education was never emphasized. My male relatives graduated from juvenile hall to county jail and then on to state prison. I was following the same path.”3

Frank had been involved in a gang and had served time in county jail. But he took a positive turn after getting out. He participated in YouthBuild, where he earned his GED, and then moved on to Public Allies, where he served at LA Works, a community-development organization, while further developing his leadership and a career path.

“I was able to attend classes at LA Trade Tech through Public Allies, which sparked my interest in education,” he says. “Here I was, a twenty-three-year old without a high school diploma, and I had fellow Allies with degrees from UCLA, USC, and other schools. I learned from them and gained confidence that I could do this, too. I am proud to be creating opportunities for young people like me to get on the path to leadership and success in our community. I'm able to make amends for damages I caused as a gang member.”

Most people don't look at the guy behind the sandwich counter, the single mom attending community college, or the former gang member and see future leaders. We do. Public Allies has developed more than 3,800 leaders like Peter, Bizunesh, and Frank over the past nineteen years. To us, it is tragic that communities and the organizations that serve them miss so much needed talent. Yet this is where most of the talent we need to solve problems resides.

When we look at many great American leaders, entrepreneurs, and organizers of social movements, we often find young people, women, and people from humble or unpromising origins. But many today who are concerned about social problems don't look in communities for leaders. Instead they look outside for heroic leaders who offer impressive, silver-bullet solutions. The press often features fawning articles about celebrities, young Ivy League graduates, or prominent business leaders who have exciting new ideas or projects that will solve our problems. For example, pundits like David Gergen and David Brooks have written glowingly about the number of young Ivy League graduates with “résumé bling” who want to start organizations to address such social challenges as education, health, poverty, and the environment.4 Such people are admirable and needed, but the media's emphasis on elite and celebrity leaders ignores the vast number of social entrepreneurs who for years have been building innovative nonprofit organizations and community solutions all across the country. A few leaders are celebrated because of their résumés, their media savvy, or their access to wealthy and politically powerful networks, and the many who have been innovating in communities for years are ignored. This kind of attention to celebrities and other elite leaders can actually discourage grassroots leaders, who don't have “résumé bling,” from stepping up.

The irony of focusing on young people from elite backgrounds is that when we study the history of social movements, or even the history of Fortune 500 companies, we rarely see founders and leaders who came from elite backgrounds. In fact, Northwestern Mutual Life researched five thousand entrepreneurs and created a questionnaire to determine a respondent's EQ, or entrepreneurship quotient. A respondent's EQ was significantly discounted if he or she had been an academic achiever, participated in group activities at school, or followed the opinions of authority figures. The questionnaire found that those who excelled more as entrepreneurs and leaders had developed street smarts, persuasiveness, humor, and creativity.5

Public Allies believes that everyone can lead. In saying this, we mean that everyone can step up and take responsibility for influencing and working with others for common goals that benefit our communities or the larger society. Leadership is not exclusively the domain of CEOs, elected officials, charismatic organizers, or celebrities. It is the domain of citizens. Our democracy is predicated on all of us stepping up to lead where we see public problems or needs.

By the term citizen I mean a member of a community, not a legal status. My use of the term citizen throughout the book is inclusive. It refers to any person who is committed to participating in making our communities better, regardless of that person's legal status—and there are many people who are not citizens in the legal sense but who do fit this picture of civic participation. One of my favorite definitions of the term citizen comes from Peter Block, who writes that a citizen is “one who is willing to be accountable to the well-being of the whole.”6

At Public Allies, we see the development of leaders as intertwined with the development of communities. If we want to strengthen our communities and solve problems, we need more leaders to come from our communities and be partners with our communities. In our increasingly diverse society, leaders must also look more like America and be connected to the communities they serve. To create lasting solutions to our most pressing problems, leaders can't just create isolated services. They must build community capacity, think systemically, and collaborate with others. We define the term community capacity as a combination of three elements:

1. The leadership and engagement of residents

2. The services and support that neighbors provide to neighbors

3. Coordination and collaboration toward common goals among the citizens, associations, nonprofits, schools, houses of worship, and businesses in a neighborhood

Leaders who can build community capacity often enact the five core practices that form the heart of this book. They recognize and mobilize all of a community's assets, they connect across cultures, they facilitate collaborative action, they continuously learn and improve, and they are accountable to those they work with and those they serve. These are the values that animate Public Allies' definition of leadership and influence how we carry out our mission. They are values that everyone can put into practice.

Our Mission: Changing the Face and Practice of Leadership

The mission of Public Allies is to advance new leadership to strengthen communities, nonprofits, and civic participation. We aim to change both the face and the practice of leadership by bringing new people to the proverbial tables of influence, and by changing the tables themselves. When we change who is sitting at the table, we also change the conversation, the process, and the results. This is how inclusion and collaboration work—it is about all of us working together as co-creators, not inviting others to help us do our work. We believe that, as a key element of solving community problems, leaders in today's communities need the ability to build community capacity. That is why we work on two fronts: we develop a new generation of diverse leaders (that is, we change the face of leadership), and we help them develop the practices they need to build community capacity and solve public problems effectively and sustainably (that is, we change the practice of leadership).

Changing the Face of Leadership

There is tremendous untapped potential for change in our communities. But most policy makers, nonprofit leaders, and community leaders fail to harness the energy, talents, and ideas of our diverse communities, especially among the people who live closest to the challenges.

Although many nonprofit organizations exist to engage citizens in solving problems, such organizations often aren't great at engaging new leadership in communities or within the organizations themselves. Research shows that nonprofit organizations do a poor job of recruiting and retaining diverse talent and often have very limited resources to invest in their people. Moreover, research at New York University and elsewhere has found a corresponding challenge in that very few young people know about careers in nonprofit and public service.7 It is stunning that organizations that exist to bring Americans together to solve public problems struggle with diversity at the leadership level. Several studies have found that between 80 percent and 90 percent of nonprofit organizations are led by Caucasians, and one study reported that younger CEOs are no more diverse than their older colleagues.8 And there is a glass ceiling in the nonprofit sector—women, who dominate the sector's workforce, are rare among CEOs of the largest nonprofit organizations and are paid less at all levels than their male colleagues.9 The groups that should be ameliorating these widespread disparities and engaging citizens of all backgrounds are instead exacerbating them! If nonprofits did a better job of building leadership in our increasingly diverse society, they could address the diversity gap in their own ranks.

In the so-called Millennials, we have a new generation whose members have a strong interest in community service (research shows that they have volunteered more than previous generations), embrace diversity (this is the most diverse generation to date), and prefer to work in teams.10 Those who seek to engage this generation by looking only at people with the best educational credentials miss a huge number of potential leaders. For example, the fact that only about 30 percent of adults are college graduates means that the practice of looking for new leaders on college campuses excludes a great number of young people.11 (And, naturally, the practice of looking for young leaders only on the campuses of elite schools excludes an even greater number of potential leaders and leaves us with a pool made up of less than 5 percent of young people, limiting the kinds of talent, creativity, experience, and skills that leaders have.) In our urban communities, only about half of the young people complete high school. Other challenges, such as teen pregnancy, criminal records, foster care, and substance abuse, create daunting barriers to potential leaders. A recent report estimated that approximately 10 percent of youth, or about four million young adults, are disconnected from education and work.12 Many community groups fail to see the potential leadership in these populations, yet many of these young people know their communities well and can be huge assets to them. Groups like YouthBuild, the Corps Network, Year Up, and our own Public Allies demonstrate the overlooked leadership potential in these populations.

Changing the Practice of Leadership

To solve community problems in a sustainable way requires community capacity. Communities can raise a child, provide security, sustain our health, secure our income, and care for vulnerable people.13 Nonprofit and public institutions play an important role in all these activities, but they can't create sustainable solutions that really move the needle on these issues without community building and systemic collaboration as core elements of their solutions. Most services focus on linear causality—the idea that one can isolate and treat one need of a person, and that one intervention will “fix” him or her. The reality is much more complex, however, and sustained change requires a variety of interventions and opportunities reinforced by a supportive community. Effective services and outcomes are important, but effective community engagement is also important to sustained success.

For example, public health research finds that the five greatest variables in producing health are personal behavior, social relations, the environment, economic well-being, and access to health care services. In that regard, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have come to emphasize community-building strategies as a far richer and more promising way of knowing and acting for long-term health than mobilizing service delivery alone. Better health care services or outcomes won't produce health; healthier communities produce health.14 Our alumnus Peter Hoeffel echoed this idea in an op-ed about the failures of a local county-funded mental health institution, saying that one in every four individuals will experience a mental illness at least once in his or her lifetime, and that supporting people with mental illness is everyone's responsibility.15 I've heard a similar case made for recent drops in crime being attributable both to more statistically driven policing efforts and to community policing efforts. This is what Robert Putnam popularized as “social capital” more than a decade ago.16 Putnam's research showed that the more relationships and group memberships people have in their communities, the more likely they are to have beneficial health, safety, educational, and economic outcomes. Nevertheless, nonprofit and public agencies and programs continue to see community building and the development of social capital as a luxury rather than as a solution.

Over the past decade in Cincinnati, Ohio, there has been a dramatic increase in the high school graduation rate, from 50 percent to 80 percent. One promising phenomenon that groups inside and outside the city point to for this success is the Strive Partnership. As Jeff Edmondson, president of Strive, explains, “The Cincinnati schools were making progress, and we brought together a wide range of leaders to help coordinate existing assets and sustain and improve those results. Rather than launching new programs, we focused on coordination and collaboration. We set the table with a mix of leaders that led to many conflicts, but we set a common goal so our conflicts were constructive toward achieving better results for all the children in our schools. The success here has been because of community building and collaboration, and I don't think you can achieve sustained results without that.”17

Efforts to build community capacity as a way of solving problems rest on the following elements, which coincide in many respects with Public Allies' five core principles:

Recognizing individual and community assetsBuilding relationships and social capital among community residents and leadersConnecting residents with local groups where they can be actively engaged as participants and leadersCollaborating across boundaries to unite local businesses, organizations, agencies, schools, and houses of worship in coordinating and collaborating toward common goalsEngaging those on the margins of the community who are labeled for their conditions and choices (people who are homeless or have mental illness as well as those who are ex-felons, high school dropouts, recipients of public assistance, and so on)Making sure that the efforts are accountable to the people who have to live with the results—the needs and interests of the community, as community members understand them, supersede what funders and others outside the community define as the community's needs and interests

Leaders must see that community residents are the most important element of any proposed solution. Building more effective programs, services, and institutions is necessary to but not sufficient for solving problems; community engagement is a critical part of any sustainable solution. Leaders must build community at least to the same extent that they build services, programs, and organizations.

To summarize, new leadership pipelines and new leadership approaches are needed to solve our most pressing problems. Public Allies builds leaders from all backgrounds who practice the values that will make them the effective community builders we so badly need. It is our goal to change both the face and the practice of leadership, thus unleashing the energy of thousands of leaders who have the skills not just to build programs or organizations but also to build community capacity and sustainable solutions. These new leaders can increase the civic participation of people from all backgrounds, building bridges between diverse sets of people and organizations so that work can go forward on achieving common goals and on creating more effective and more responsive nonprofits. That is our mission, and we believe that this approach to leadership will make existing efforts to address community problems far more likely to succeed and to be sustainable.

Our Definition of Leadership

The Public Allies' definition of leadership has evolved from our beliefs and experience. It is also grounded in history, relevant to current trends, and informed by the latest theory (see Chapter Three). Our definition has three components:

1.Leadership is an action many can take, not a position few can hold. U.S. history, from the Revolutionary War through social movements, has demonstrated that change always comes from the courageous and extraordinary acts of many ordinary people, not just the inspiration or direction of a few.

2.Leadership is about taking responsibility—personal and social—to work with others for common goals. Leaders step up, assume personal responsibility, and accept social responsibility to work on common goals that make positive changes for themselves and others.

3.Leadership is about the practice of values that engage community members and groups to work effectively together toward common goals. The five values that we at Public Allies believe are needed to lead our communities toward lasting and effective change in the twenty-first century are recognizing and mobilizing community assets, connecting across cultures, facilitating collaborative action, continuously learning and improving, and being accountable to those we work with and those we serve.

The Story of Public Allies

Our mission and our definition of leadership have evolved from practice, through the development of our leadership program and the many lessons we've learned partnering with organizations to develop leaders in twenty-one cities over nineteen years. There were no guarantees that Public Allies would succeed when it was started by a resourceful community of diverse, idealistic young people. There were challenges and disappointments—and moments when failure seemed more imminent than success. But a set of values and strong beliefs formed and held by the group took the vision of two young women and turned it into a diverse community of thousands, a community that has continued for almost two decades, with the president of the United States and the first lady among those who helped shape it. Here is the story of how Public Allies came to be, and of how we implement our vision, our mission, and our definition of leadership.

In the Beginning

While Vanessa Kirsch was growing up, she struggled with school because of dyslexia. From an early age, she was often pulled out of classes for tutoring. When she applied to Tufts University, she made the case that she should be given a chance at admission despite her low SAT scores. Tufts agreed, and Vanessa's hard work and tenacity indeed made her a great success. In 1991, at the age of twenty-six, she was working for the pollster Peter Hart and had demonstrated her entrepreneurial skills by founding the Women's Information Network, a group supporting young women leaders in Washington, D.C. Vanessa had also recently completed a survey of young people, titled Democracy's Next Generation, for the organization People for the American Way. One of her primary findings was that young people wanted to get involved in working for change but did not know how. With Peter Hart's full support, Vanessa decided to leave her job and start an organization to mobilize young people.a

Another young woman who had discovered that organizations were struggling to identify, support, and develop young leaders was Katrina Browne. Katrina, a twenty-three-year-old Princeton graduate from the Philadelphia area, had been working at the Advocacy Institute through Princeton Project 55, a program sponsored by Princeton's graduating class of 1955 that sponsored other Princeton graduates who wanted to pursue public service for a summer or a year. Katrina worked on a study of how nonprofit and public interest organizations were recruiting and developing their next generation of leaders. She discovered that these organizations were having an especially difficult time finding young leaders of color and young leaders from disadvantaged communities in general (the communities that these organizations served).b Katrina's understanding of and passion for history gave the organization not only grounding in past social movements but also inspiration that changing this dynamic in communities would take a new kind of movement led by young people themselves.

Vanessa Kirsch and Katrina Browne met at one of Vanessa's Women's Information Network gatherings. They compared notes and came up with the idea of creating a vehicle to connect young leaders, especially those who were underrepresented in the leadership ranks, with local nonprofit organizations that could make good use of their energy, idealism, and skills in these organizations' mission to make a greater difference. As Katrina explains, “I realized that, because of my background and the school I attended, I had access to my internship, mentors, and other support, and I thought that everybody who wanted to make a difference, especially those coming from the communities served, should have that opportunity.”18 Vanessa and Katrina exemplified a kind of servant leadership that has been core to Public Allies ever since. They understood their privilege and used it cleverly for the benefit of a larger, more inclusive community.

In the early 1990s, when the first Public Allies program was launched, young people—known as Generation X—were primarily viewed in a negative way and were often seen as slackers and gangsters. The crack epidemic and gang violence were at their height. Ecstasy-fueled raves were the rage, AIDS was still on the rise (NBA star Magic Johnson had just announced his diagnosis), and “safe sex” was a new mantra. Music was defined by the grunge of Pearl Jam and Nirvana, the pop-country of Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus, and hip-hop that ranged from the violent rap of NWA, the dance pop of MC Hammer, the positive rap of Arrested Development, and the political rap of Public Enemy. Slacker, Malcolm X, Reservoir Dogs, Boyz in the Hood, and Thelma and Louise were the films capturing young people's attention. Vice President Dan Quayle and conservative pundits were scandalized by the title character of the TV series Murphy Brown because of her choice to have a child out of wedlock. The Cosby Show came to a close. MTV still mostly showed music videos. Seinfeld, the “show about nothing,” was on the rise, and In Living Color launched the careers of the Wayans brothers, Jim Carrey, and Jamie Foxx.

On the political scene, a presidential election pitted the later-named Greatest Generation (represented by President George H. W. Bush) against the baby-boom generation (represented by Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas), and Rock the Vote was launched to mobilize Generation X. Gays and lesbians were still mostly absent from popular and political culture but were a rising force because of the fight for AIDS-related legislation (such as the Ryan White Care Act) and the battle over whether gays and lesbians could serve openly in the military (a battle that resulted in the “don't ask, don't tell” policy). Other milestones at or around this time were the first Persian Gulf War, an economic recession, and the riots that took place in Los Angeles and led to Rodney King's famous question “Can we all get along?” In this milieu, there was a need to bring Generation X to a new place. According to Vanessa, “There were so many negative stereotypes of our generation as apathetic, uncaring, cynical, selfish, and even violent. We wanted nothing less than to redefine a generation in all its diversity as a positive force for change—as allies for our communities.”19