The Scarcest Community Asset
Complex civic challenges – ranging from food security to economic mobility to maternal health – cannot be addressed by a single program or agency. The Covid pandemic reinforced the interconnectedness of those and other issues, as well as our interdependence.
The pandemic also demonstrated that we live in an age of abundance, as public, private and philanthropic resources flowed at unprecedented levels. As one regional food bank leader shared during the peak of the pandemic, “We have more resources than ever. The real challenge is to use those resources to create more food security in our communities, not just provide more food to more people.”
Meeting that challenge – disrupting an entrenched status quo – requires us to work together to address interconnected issues and our interdependence. And Covid also highlighted that we struggle to work well together.
Working well together requires the scarcest of community assets, leadership. A particular type of leadership that creates the space where people can come together to develop a shared understanding of what it means and what it takes to collaborate to achieve enduring, positive community change.
Working together requires resources, too. But well-resourced collaboratives without the appropriate leadership fail all the time. In contrast, well-led collaboratives with modest financial support can be sustained for years.
Our communities are full of organizational leaders, many of whom excel at helping their organizations produce meaningful outcomes. But there are too few people willing and able to exercise collaborative leadership – using their power and influence to catalyze change beyond the boundaries of their own organizations.
Exercising collaborative leadership means:
- Sharing power with others.
- Identifying how you contribute to the inequitable status quo and then change your own beliefs and practices to improve outcomes. And you share your journey in ways that inspire others to change, as well.
- Co-creating solutions and shared goals with others and working together to learn what it takes to achieve those goals.
These types of practices often are in tension with the needs of an organization. Collaborative leaders identify, navigate and leverage that tension to achieve enduring, positive community change.
Exercising such leadership is risky. And can best be done with others. When a group of like-minded leaders who trust and support each other begin practicing this time of leadership together the status quo begins to change.
This kind of leadership is scarce, but it can be built. Encouragingly there are multiple efforts that have helped build cohorts of collaborative leaders. We can learn what it takes to build this kind of leadership from these and other efforts.
Programs like the Working Cities Challenge hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Advance Together program hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas have trained and supported a number of collaborative leaders. Foundations are particularly well suited for supporting cohorts of emerging collaborative civic leaders. The Stark Community Foundation and a few other partners convened and supported a group of leaders over a multi-year period that led to the formation of a collective effort, Strengthening Stark, to build a more vibrant community. The Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley convened a group of leaders and helped them explore whether they wanted to begin to exercise this type of leadership together. That nurturing led to the creation of the Healthy Community Partnership. The Rotary Charities of Traverse City provides coaching to help individuals exercise this kind of leadership.
Addressing complex, civic challenges requires a specific kind of leadership. Together we can develop cohorts of collaborative leaders who are willing and able to share power, co-create solutions and disrupt the inequitable status quo in our communities.
