Our View of Leadership…
We asked the Horizons participants to give us their feedback about how their community is changing in the areas of Poverty Reduction, Increasing Leadership and Community Change. The next few posts are the responses to questions about each of those topics…
What changes are you seeing in the way community leadership is exercised or carried out?
- People who used to be “strong” leaders are now backing down a few steps to let other people step up to the plate and be a leader.
How is it different?
- Well it’s different because the people who you used to really count on, are still there, but they choose not to take on a very large responsibility. It’s not that they don’t want it, but they are making the leadership position more spread out among community members/leaders.
How has your community changed after LeadershipPlenty training?
- People have come to realize what a leader actually does, and how many people in the community they can see as leaders.
- Mostly it identified leaders within our community.
In what ways have leadership skills been improved/enhanced?
- I see more people being involved with community activities.
- People are taking a risk and being a leader.
What is different?
- We have more people as leaders now.
What changes are you seeing in the way leadership is carried out?
- Like I said before, the “strong” leaders are not taking a few steps back, and sometimes they have a tendency to not voice their opinion.
How decisions get made in your community?
- I see that everybody has a say in mostly everything that a community does, but some people are not willing to step out of their “comfort zone” and speak up. As of right now, people are adjusting to the new leaders and someday they’ll voice their opinion.
- Some people are voicing their opinion.
What difference does the involvement of low income people make in community leadership?
- Involvement of low income people make community leadership different because they bring new ideas, one’s that a middle or upper class person might not have thought about.
- They bring in more diversity because they represent mostly everybody. Believe it or not!
- They also help bring about issues that are a very large concern to them, and maybe not a large concern to the middle or upper class.