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…
How has your community leadership expanded?
In one instance: there is a new group taking over an activity that the committee from last year’s event resigned after several years on the activity. A new group of parents have stepped up to make sure the event will still succeed as it has in the past several years.
What changes have been made in who is now involved in leadership positions? For instance:
ü Are more people participating in leadership? The leaders seem to be the same people as there are always individuals that seem to want to help with several activities, but refuse to be “in charge.” There is more of co-leadership positions rather than one person in charge. It seems to spread out the responsibilities.
ü Are different kinds of people (representing more sectors or parts of the community) now participating in community leadership? I don’t really see more sectors at this point and time. There always has to be an issue of dispute that makes people get involved. They seem to think that is the time to get in and change things.
ü Does the community leadership reflect the community’s demographic profile? I don’t really see that it is represented on the percentage of the community’s demographics.
ü Are more low income people participating in community leadership? To some extent. It seems to be people of all income levels that are community minded.
What changes have been made in the way your community recruits and trains new leaders? The people always seem to think others will step up and be in charge as leaders and sometimes things will roll right along and then people lose interest and meetings just don’t seem to be a priority. Although they still want the end product to show results, but they are just “too busy” to get involved.
Sustains existing leaders? As I said before, it seems to be the same people that are the leaders and maybe part of the problem is that those people are so used to taking charge, that they just do it and don’t ask for help. It is probably just a matter of retraining those people too.
Written by Debbie Pageler