Category: Updates

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Humane Leadership Ideas Build Young Leaders

Humane Leadership is on the move again.

The core ideas of Humane Leadership – continuous performance innovation in the self leadership lab, internalizing and applying new mental models with Wisdom Jigs, and professional self and project leadership skills – have found there way into some fascinating places over the past few years.

One of the most exciting places is in the Local Innovation Lab, a highly impactful internship experience meeting important community needs in partnership with Southern Oregon University. To support the interns, we created a 10-week online course including live online workshops that uses project-based learning to develop student project and self leadership skills. Empowering young people with professional level skills creates the next generation of leaders who know how maximize effectiveness and humanity at once.

The program has helped city governments, local community groups, and businesses recover from the 2020 Labor Day fires in Southern Oregon while giving students valuable experiences that bridged into full time work for nearly 40% of the first cohort.

The approach of the course has been so successful SOU has formed an innovation community of leading professors to look at how the core ideas and practices of the course might be worked more deeply into courses across the university and beyond potentially as an Open Educational Resource.

From the very beginning we had three questions, we’ve answered the first two; What would humane leadership look like? Is it learnable? See the book for our answers to these questions. Now, we are on to question three, if humane leadership works and is learnable, then how might we make it that new norm?

Today, we continue to look for innovative ways to empower emergent leaders with the skills they need to empower themselves.

As all this goes on, I continue to be our lead researcher, pushing out towards the edges of self and community leadership in search of insights that will empower a more humane collective future.

Of course, we’ve also been busy sharing the power of Humane Leadership in more traditional settings, including:

  • Training workshops for a variety of groups including corporate learning professionals via Executive Learning Exchange, the Pacific Northwest Organizational Development Network, Film Festival Alliance, Firebrand’s Zone Captains, and Stanford Children’s Hospital.
  • Leadership support work for a variety of community, educational, and business leaders – leadership support includes traditional coaching as well as extra support in areas where capacity is constrained.

Thank you for supporting our work.

Please reach out if you have any questions or ideas you’d like to discuss.

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R3V Facilitator Update – Week 25 – 2022 – LTRG Update

This is a final update from your facilitator on progress to date and ideas for next steps on turning tragedy into transformation after the September 2020 urban wildfires in the Rogue Valley.

As these are the final days of my contract to support Caryn Wheeler-Clay in building the LTRG into a thriving recovery organization, I thought I would reflect on the efforts outlined in our statement of work.

Work we set out to do

  • Build one strong organization with the strengths of both R3V and the LTRG 
  • Support the LTRG’s ED in building the organization and its impact
    • Onboard staff – Admin assistant, public health and housing program leads
    • Build core operations – finance, HR, convening meetings, communications, development, board
    • Build programs – housing, community rebuilding, DCM and unmet needs 
    • Build impact and visibility – hosting impactful conversations and projects 

Progress to date (Italics)

  • Build one strong organization with the strengths of both R3V and the LTRG 
    • Caryn and team have taken up the work of recovery and transformation by helping center the voices of fire-affected and typically underrepresented community members. The organization has secured funding and staffed for bilingual and bicultural community building and housing affordability work.
  • Support the LTRG’s ED in building the organization and its impact
    • Onboard staff – Admin assistant, public health and housing program leads
      • The public health position remains unfunded, but the roles of assistant, outreach and communications, and housing program lead have been funded and candidates hired or in process of hiring.
    • Build core operations – finance, HR, convening meetings, communications, development, board
      • Budgets for the current and coming fiscal years have been aligned with our fiscal sponsor’s (Catholic Charities) processes and systems, HR methods are aligned with CCO, staff has begun taking on the management of newsletter and website projects and has been active in community outreach events.
      • R3V has supported the work of fundraising consultants to secure long-term funding for the LTRG’s mission.
      • Board governance and development projects are being coordinated by staff and completed by board members.
    • Build programs – housing, community rebuilding, DCM and unmet needs 
      • The housing program continues to develop partnerships to align available land with developers and funding sources. We are working to align available housing land with the $119MM Home Ownership Program of the OCHS’s CDBG-DR action plan. This should result in many new affordable ownership opportunities for valley residents in the coming years.
      • The housing program lead will become a valuable asset to the community’s commitment to meeting the housing needs of the valley’s residents.
    • Build impact and visibility – hosting impactful conversations and projects 

Thanks and thoughts on next steps

Thanks to all our community partners who have brought their clarity and creativity to our work at every step.

A special thanks to Oregon Community Foundation’s Community Rebuilding Fund for supporting our work financially and with wise counsel.

Based on my experience over the past several months, I would suggest the following priorities for the coming months:

  • Build the LTRG culture of project leadership internally so the organization becomes very effective at moving community initiatives forward, earning influence by being know for doing relevant, unique work.
  • Continue outreach into the fire-affected community to ensure that all our work is relevant to their long-term recovery and wellbeing.
  • Engage the broader community in conversations around what our recovery should look like. This can include the formal Community Recovery Plan process, but also informal Collective Impact conversations and panel discussions on the topics that invite creativity and alignment of effort.
  • Continue thinking creatively to find initiatives that will turn tragedy into transformation in the unique ways only a community-based nonprofit as agile as the LTRG can.
    • Housing is the first priority as it is the basis of all recovery and wellbeing
    • Community rebuilding – especially around weaving in voices that have not historically been at the center of decision making processes.
    • Leadership development – recovery, resilience, and inclusion all require a growing group of leaders who are continuously improving their skills.
    • Partnerships – the community is only as strong as the network of partners that supports it. Both the strength of partner organizations and the trusting, effective collaborative relationships between them are crucial measures of the success of the LTRG and our community.
  • Build the financial and operational strength of the organization so that you can become your own free-standing 501c3 with long-term staff who become experts in community recovery.

I appreciate the opportunity to serve in the work of this community. I have learned so much and have built lifelong friendships.

I am grateful for you and your work,

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R3V Facilitator Update – Week 20 – 2022 – LTRG Update

I hope you’ve been well, it’s been a while since our last update.  

We’re making steady progress building our community momentum toward recovery.  

Caryn and I meet a few times per week to work on ramping up the LTRG including:

  • Onboarding new team members working in Assistant and Outreach and Communications roles.
  • Securing budget approval for this year and next
  • Supporting our fundraising consultants and drafting a grant strategy to fund program and capacity

You can see the complete overview of what we’ve been up to on the R3V Dashboard for this week. 

If you missed the Collective Impact conversation on the Community Development Block Grant opportunities, you can see the recording here.

Please reach out if you have any questions,

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R3V Facilitator Update – Week 10 – 2022 – Building, Building

I hope you’ve been well, it’s been a while since our last update.  

We’re making steady progress building our community momentum toward recovery.  

Caryn and I meet many times per week to work on ramping up the LTRG including:

You can see the complete overview of what I’ve been up to on the R3V Dashboard for this week.  Caryn works with me as a tiny fraction of her work to support the recovery.

If you missed the Collective Impact conversation on the Community Re Visioning opportunities before us with the SR99 Traffic Growth Management study, the Greenway Re Visioning, and the Community Rebuilding Plan, you can see the recording here.

Please reach out if you have any questions,

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R3V Facilitator Update – Week 6 2022 – Aligning Efforts

We’ve been a bit quiet, but we’ve been busy so far this year!

In December, the R3V steering committee decided to explore supporting the LTRG executive director, Caryn Wheeler-Clay, as she builds what will be a key organization in our recovery from the Alameda and Obenchain fires as well as our resiliency from any potential future challenges.  

Backbone Organization

To step into the work of exploring how we might support Caryn and the LTRG, we had a series of meetings with the LTRG executive committee and full board  to discuss in detail how we can support their efforts.  

I now meet three times per week with Caryn to support her work and help build the organization.  Together, we are working through the details of hiring, the grant writing function, meetings and rationalizing committee structures, board strategic planning, IT infrastructure, and community relationship building.

We have contracted with Sequoia Consulting to begin grant prospecting for the LTRG.  This will be invaluable support for Caryn and her teams’ work in the coming months and years. We think OCF for allowing us to use the community rebuilding funds they made available to R3V in a way that will support the recovery of our community.

Housing

The R3V project work on land availability for housing continues as I reach out to the leaders of similar land campaigns in Colorado and California. We already have one deal in the preliminary contract stage and are in discussions with a local institution about their excess land and how we might support converting some of that into housing.

Community Rebuilding

Carrie Turney-Ross of the Jackson County Library System facilitated our last Spanish adult literacy conversation and has agreed to lead the program forward.

Our support of the Zone Captains program continues in a variety of ways and now includes community leadership training, see the course outline here.

Please reach out if you have any thoughts on how we might support the recovery further,