Community Effects of Leadership Development Education: Citizen Empowerment for Civic Engagement (Rural Studies) - Hardcover

Kenneth Pigg (author); Stephen Gasteyer (author); Kenneth Martin (author); Godwin Apaliyah (author) & Kari Keating (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1940425573 ISBN 13: 9781940425573

Publisher: West Virginia University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Community leadership development programs are designed to increase the capacity of citizens for civic engagement. These programs fill gaps in what people know about governance and the processes of governance, especially at the local level. The work of many in this field is a response to the recognition that in smaller, rural communities, disadvantaged neighborhoods, or disaster areas, the skills and aptitudes needed for citizens to be successful leaders are often missing or underdeveloped. Community Effects of Leadership Development Education presents the results of a five-year study tracking community-level effects of community leadership development programs drawn from research conducted in Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia. As the first book of its kind to seek answers to the question of whether or not the millions of dollars invested each year in community leadership development programs are valuable in the real world, this book challenges researchers, community organizers, and citizens to identify improved ways of demonstrating the link from program to implementation, as well as the way in which programs are conceived and designed. This text also explores how leadership development programs relate to civic engagement, power and empowerment, and community change, and it demonstrates that community leadership development programs really do produce community change. At the same time, the findings of this study strongly support a relational view of community leadership, as opposed to other traditional leadership models used for program design. To complement their findings, the authors have developed CENCE, a new model for community leadership development programs, which links leadership development efforts to community development by understanding how Civic Engagement, Networks, Commitment, and Empowerment work together to produce community viability.

About this title

About the Author

Kenneth Pigg has been helping community leaders become more effective change agents in their community for over forty years as a specialist with the Cooperative Extension Service in Kentucky and Missouri and has served on a number of national panels and projects dealing with community change and leadership.

Ken Martin is Chair of the Department of Extension and Associate Director, Programs for Ohio State University Extension.

Stephen P. Gasteyer is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University, USA.

Godwin T. Apaliyah is the The Ohio State University Extension's Community Development Educator, and the Director of Economic Development, Fayette County.

Kari Keating is a Teaching Associate in Agricultural Leadership Education at the University of Illinois, USA.

From the Back Cover

Community leadership development programs are designed to increase the capacity of citizens for civic engagement. These programs fill gaps in what people know about governance and the processes of governance, especially at the local level. The work of many in this field is a response to the recognition that in smaller, rural communities, disadvantaged neighborhoods, or disaster areas, the skills and aptitudes needed for citizens to be successful leaders are often missing or underdeveloped.

Community Effects of Leadership Development Education presents the results of a five-year study tracking community-level effects of community leadership development programs drawn from research conducted in Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia.

As the first book of its kind to seek answers to the question of whether or not the millions of dollars invested each year in community leadership development programs are valuable in the real world, this book challenges researchers, community organizers, and citizens to identify improved ways of demonstrating the link from program to implementation, as well as the way in which programs are conceived and designed.

This text also explores how leadership development programs relate to civic engagement, power and empowerment, and community change, and it demonstrates that community leadership development programs really do produce community change. At the same time, the findings of this study strongly support a relational view of community leadership, as opposed to other traditional leadership models used for program design.

To complement their findings, the authors have developed CENCE, a new model for community leadership development programs, which links leadership development efforts to community development by understanding how Civic Engagement, Networks, Commitment, and Empowerment work together to produce community viability.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Community Effects of Leadership Development Education

Citizen Empowerment for Civic Engagement

By Kenneth Pigg, Stephen Gasteyer, Kenneth Martin, Godwin Apaliyah, Kari Keating

West Virginia University Press

Copyright © 2015 West Virginia University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-940425-57-3

Contents

Preface, 
Introduction, 
PART I COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT EFFECTS ON COMMUNITY, 
1. Community Leadership, 
2. Impact of Leadership Development Programs on Individual Participants, 
3. Program Outcomes in Organizational Behavior, 
4. Community Leadership Development's Effects on Community, 
5. Participant Diversity, Curriculum Design, and Community Effects, 
6. Designing More Effective Community Leadership Development Programs, 
PART II A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT IN ACTION, 
7. New Directions for Community Leadership Development, 
8. Community Leadership Relies on Social Cohesion, 
9. Toward a General Theory of Community Leadership?, 
Notes, 
Appendices, 
References, 
Index, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Community Leadership

Many rural places struggle to keep young people at home and to give them a reason to stay in the form of economic opportunity. Lafayette County in Missouri is one such locality and has taken a regional approach to the challenge. Corinne Estancia is the community economic development director for Lafayette County and a graduate of the community leadership development (CLD) program there. She credits this program and the people with whom she developed relationships with during it with the idea for the Old Trails Regional Tourism project.

The tourism project is intended to create new economic opportunity and builds on three natural and cultural assets of the region, which now includes part or all of ten counties in west central Missouri. First, historically, the region was the head of the Santa Fe Trail along the Missouri River, which was linked to the Lewis and Clark expedition. Several scenic byways are marked to steer tourist traffic to selected sites in the region. Second, it has a notable regional cuisine. Third, it has financial and technical assistance assets that target entrepreneurial development, especially — to build on the second asset — agritourism enterprises that use labels of origin as a primary marketing tool. In fact, it won a Stronger Economies Together program grant in 2010 from the US Department of Agriculture's Rural Development Administration.

Corinne is quick to point out that the Old Trails Regional Tourism project is fundamentally a regional collaboration success story grounded in the education she and several of her fellow leadership program participants undertook. They learned not only to identify and use these assets as a foundation for a development program, but also how to attract other partners to their purpose. They built relationships and gained political capital from local mayors, county commissioners, and state and federal elected officials. These relationships led to active support from funding and technical support agencies such as USDA Rural Development, the Missouri Economic Development Commission, and the Extension Community Economic and Entrepreneurial Development program sponsored by University of Missouri Extension. The Old Trails project now boasts a membership base of over one hundred business and local government entities that span the region, including artisans, wineries, hospitality and travel enterprises, and agricultural producers.

The project's success can also be attributed to the partnership established among government agencies and businesses and maintained based on the shared purposes its mission defines and its governing board's leaders (who represent the different interest groups across the region) consistently emphasize. "We just keep at it," says Don Battey, who is president of the board. "Communication to potential partners and to the tourism marketplace is an important part of our strategy. Our speakers' bureau does a terrific job of telling people around the region about this project, its vision for the region and its successes to date." Battey also notes:

The leadership program in Lafayette County of which I was part gave me the tools, network, and confidence to reach beyond my own community to all those in the region and build relationships from a common point of reference, selling the idea on a sharing of interests that was bigger than any single community. That was not always an easy sell in rural Missouri, but I learned that you can't order people around in community work; instead you have to communicate your common interests and be consistent and enthusiastic about it. You also have to demonstrate that some influential people have committed political capital to the outcomes we want to achieve.

The strength of this partnership group was tested a few years ago when an agricultural producer wanted to establish a concentrated hog feeding operation close to a primary historic community along one a scenic byway. According to members of the partnership, this operation would have seriously affected the area's tourism by damaging the landscape. "The odors would have kept the tourists away, I'm sure," said Battey. The organization rallied other regional groups, the local people, and their elected representatives to pressure the producer to change its plans and to convince the relevant regulating agencies to deny a rezoning permit for property so close to the community.

Corinne and Don's experience demonstrates what we argue for in this volume. That is, de Tocqueville's Mother Science, which focused primarily on Americans' associational tendencies, is only a part of the "science" today. Getting together and convincing individuals and groups to work for a common cause must be coupled with leadership and political (or civic) engagement in order to be successful. Our research will demonstrate the central importance of civic engagement and social cohesion, created in the form of new associations and relationships, for achieving community change.

Increasing Community Capacity and Civic Engagement

The term "community capacity" often refers to the local ability to accomplish local change (Gittell and Vidal 1998). Some authors argue that high capacity means successful community organizing, which results in associational tendencies somewhat similar to those de Tocqueville outlined. Others argue that increasing capacity involves the ability to recognize and mobilize community assets (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993). Still others find that community capacity-building is very similar to community development (Robinson and Green 2011). Regardless of the definition of community capacity-building in concept or operation, all seem to agree that this capacity is important for community change.

Civic (or political) engagement is also implicit in nearly all discussions about how to increase and use community capacity to change communities. Further, the authors above recognize that one of civic engagement's fundamental elements is leadership or leaders' ability to use this capacity for change. Without community leaders' demonstrated ability to mobilize resources, institutional leaders do not recognize citizens involved in change activities as having any influence or power to actually induce change, which neuters their "capacity." Effective community change requires civic engagement — direct involvement in publicly acknowledged work that produces desired community outcomes.

This is the lesson Corrine learned in her leadership development program. By the time the program ended, she felt empowered to act — but she now also knew that acting alone was not the answer. Rather, she had to connect both with others who had similar interests and also those who controlled the resources necessary to achieve her goals. This required engaging in political or civic activity: Corinne and her partners' work was for public rather than private benefit, was transparent to the residents of the communities it would affect, and depended on certain political officials' influence to acquire important material resources.

Many of those in the field use the term civic engagement to describe the nature of the individual's political activity and relationship with political institutions and processes at all levels of society, but especially at the community level (Mathews 1999; Putnam 1993b). We use this term to relate primarily to residents' political engagement in the public life of their community. Our research identifies civic engagement as an outcome of leadership development programs created to increase people's capacity to act as leaders. Such interventions explain program participants' increased civic engagement and, subsequently, the benefits that result from their involvement in community actions. Further, we argue that community leadership is often fundamentally political, involving civic actions or "public work" as Boyte and Kari (1998) describe it, though practitioners and sponsors largely ignore this aspect of CLD activity.

INCREASED COMMUNITY CAPACITY AND CLD

Each year, CLD programs are widely implemented with millions of dollars in support from various sources. In 1995, the National Association for Community Leadership Organizations estimated that close to five million — a conservative guess — was spent annually on an estimated 650 to 750 individual programs (Fredricks 1999). Although there are state-level programs in addition to community-level ones, these tend to have somewhat different objectives with more focus on political agendas. According to a study the National Association for Community Leadership Organizations published in 1988, the first CLD program was in Philadelphia; this program began in 1959 and is still in operation, and its approach has been duplicated in a number of places (Moore 1988). Rural communities have taken note and, facing equally difficult challenges, have developed their own approaches with assistance from local chambers of commerce and non-profits, universities, and foundations such as W. K. Kellogg, the Ford Family Foundation, and the Pew Foundation, among others.

Considerable resources have been expended to document effects of these efforts, with mixed results. While most sponsors, especially external ones, want to evaluate programs and determine results, many programs end without systematic evaluations (Reinelt et al. 2002). The evaluations that do occur rarely assess programs' actual effects on their communities. After all, CLD programs are intended not only to change individuals, but also to produce collective benefits within communities. The only reason to increase citizens' capacity to act as effective community leaders is that there are unmet needs in the community that existing leaders are insufficient or unable to meet. Figure 1.1 summarizes the environmental and social factors CLD must confront. Questions related to how community residents can be empowered to engage in civic activity are central, as this engagement is what produces change and local development. Local leaders must learn how to envision a possible and compelling future by thinking ahead, and how to thoroughly assess the local resources and strengths they can use to produce change. They must also learn to manage and address community complexity; they must understand that communities cannot directly control the complex global factors at play, but can manage the local effects if their leaders recognize and learn to adapt to them (Heifetz and Linsky 2002). In addition, local leaders must learn how to build their systemic civic structure's capacity so that decision-making is effective and efficient, conflicts are resolved in mutually acceptable ways, resources are usefully allocated, and the local community's values and norms are recognized (Couto 1992).

The research we report in this volume directly addresses most of the factors figure 1.1 presents. We demonstrate how CLD efforts can enhance capacity at the individual, organizational, and community levels. We frame our discussion very broadly, incorporating de Tocqueville's ideas from his nineteenth-century visits to America to Margaret Wheatley's ideas from complexity theory, from Robert Dahl's political economy to Ken Wilkinson's sociology. We also draw upon the limited research work done, mostly in the 1980s, by a number of people in agencies and organizations that historically sponsored CLD program efforts.

Our research only initiates what we envision as a long-term effort to better understand community leadership and how it forms and functions most effectively at the local level. We begin the process by linking individual outcomes of what many people will understand as an educational intervention, a programmatic effort organized to improve and increase the local pool of leaders for community betterment, to the community effects these leaders produce based on their experience. We recognize this is but the beginning. We cannot address every factor in the figure 1.1 infogram, the contextual ones, although we speculate about them in logical ways. We wish to engage readers in a more comprehensive consideration of the nature of the intervention as well as its purpose as seen in this broader context. We also wish to challenge readers to consider leadership itself as a social relationship rather than an individual attribute. If you accept such a challenge, read on.

CLD PROGRAMS ARE DIVERSE

Data for the study reported here were drawn from research conducted in six states, from six locations in each state. The data set regarding individual effects came from an online survey conducted in 2008 to determine the effects of participation in CLD programs. The second part of the study to determine community effects involved data from five of the original six states and four locations in each state.

From the beginning, we wanted to demonstrate the impact of CLD programs, and so we devised a way to identify both a treatment and comparison sample to achieve this objective. We also wanted to show that our approach would accommodate at least some variation in program design and implementation. For the six initial states — Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia — we demonstrate that sort of variation with programs devised and sponsored by various educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, foundations, and individuals (including participants). These sponsors include: Cooperative Extension Services; chambers of commerce; local, regional, and national foundations; community colleges; and, often, some combination of these organizations. However, all the programs are community-based. We define a community-based program as: (1) focused on community issues and needs; (2) organized and managed locally by a community group of some sort; and (3) sponsored, wholly or largely, by local resources. Many of these programs also rely on local human resources, such as schools and law enforcement agencies, to deliver content such as that related to local history and local institutions and organizations. In addition, these programs emphasize an educational rather than a training approach; in other words, they introduce and explore ideas about leadership and related concepts using various educational strategies, including self-study, group discussion, role play, and presentations, but do not attempt to turn these ideas into practiced skill sets. Instead, the sponsors recognize the range of applications that will be required and the need for general cognitive and behavioral abilities. While these programs may have opportunities to practice learning and may incorporate some coaching techniques into their curriculums, they do not use more rigorous training models.

Despite these commonalities the available local conditions, sponsorship, and resources lead to many differences. Some CLD programs we studied comprised over 120 hours of contact time, including weekend retreats, tours, and intensive day and evening sessions, while others included half as many hours with a corresponding difference in design elements. Most of the programs generally aimed to increase local leaders' capacity to improve the community's well-being. For some sponsors, this objective translated into support for economic development program efforts; for others, into attempts to redress poverty or improve education or cultural facilities. Where multiple possible sponsors were interested in leadership development efforts but had limited resources, they developed partnerships with resulting compromises in curriculum design. Most of the programs studied operated on "the academy model," enrolling a group of fifteen to thirty participants in a class of three to nine months, complete with a graduation ceremony. Others term this design a "cohort model" (Sandfort and Bloomberg 2012).

Individual sessions may have focused on individual skills development and self-discovery, team building exercises, and diversity, as well as learning sessions that addressed different sectors of the community and the operations, resources, and needs of each. These topical sessions often introduced participants to formal leaders in the community and broke down barriers between residents and institutional authorities. Such sessions also led to the "network effect" that frequent and intense interaction produces among the participants over the course of a CLD program (Rasmussen et al. 2011). The network effect refers to the relationships developed through this interaction and the knowledge about others' interests and skills that may become useful in collaboration later on.

Depending on the sponsoring organization, participant recruitment varied. Some programs welcomed anyone interested who could dedicate the time (and, often, the funds) to take part. Since most programs charged a fee to cover implementation costs, sponsors often raised money for "scholarships" from among community businesses and individuals. Other programs were more selective — for example, chamber programs were typically restricted to chamber of commerce members, and many CLD programs sponsored by external foundations had to include specific target audiences. An exception to this general design can be found in the two sites in Minnesota that participated in the Horizons program, sponsored by the Northwest Area Foundation, in which a broad spectrum of community residents followed a prescribed off-the-shelf curriculum borrowed from external sources and adapted somewhat to local conditions (Allen and Lachapelle 2012).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Community Effects of Leadership Development Education by Kenneth Pigg, Stephen Gasteyer, Kenneth Martin, Godwin Apaliyah, Kari Keating. Copyright © 2015 West Virginia University Press. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: West Virginia University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1940425573
• ISBN 13: 9781940425573
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 251