Kellogg Leadership for Community Change (KLCC)

The goal of the programme is to strengthen communities by helping individuals who are already engaged in community stewardship recognise themselves and others as leaders, and then develop the shared leadership expertise needed to work across a range of backgrounds and perspectives. This includes promoting and nurturing collective and culturally appropriate leadership in communities across the country.

• KLCC Session I which ran from January 2003 to August 2004, mobilised participants around the theme: Strengthening Public Will and Action Towards Quality Teaching and Learning. Six communities and more than 125 fellows participated in this session, identifying challenges facing their communities in the field of teaching and learning and pursuing projects specific to the needs of their community. They worked to develop the social and cultural literacy that would enable leaders from different segments of a community to come together and work toward the common good. The fellows also worked to nurture collective leadership within their communities and then use collective action to create systems change. Their primary objective was long-term leadership development that is collective, action-oriented and involves a critical mass of practitioners within diverse communities.
• KLCC Session II was launched in June 2005 and will conclude in 2007. It has engaged five communities around the theme: Valuing and Building Youth-Adult Partnerships to Advance Just Communities. The purpose of KLCC Session II is to "unleash the potential of youth and adults to engage together in shaping the common good by collectively building new pathways for youth to serve as social change agents."

KLCC proposes that conventional approaches to training leaders often overlook important community voices. To ensure a diversity of community perspectives, KLCC aims to capitalise on a variety of social, economic, cultural and experiential criteria during the process of defining and identifying programme participants. After selecting a diverse cohort of fellows in several communities from around the country, KLCC works with these leaders to develop shared leadership skills, and provides opportunities for them to exchange best practices and resources while advancing a new collective vision for their communities.

In March 2006 about 175 KLCC fellows, coaches, evaluators, project leaders, coordinating organisation staff and national consultants from Sessions I and II joined several Kellogg Foundation staff for a conference themed “The Sound of Change.” The conference aimed to provide an opportunity to share stories, strategies, and experiences of using collective leadership to create just communities and positive change.

A monthly newsletter is published to help all those involved in the programme share information about experiences and strategies.

A report was published in 2005 outlining lessons learned in the implementation of the programme, including leadership lessons related to communications. "The task of communications is absolutely integral to being heard and to achieving sustainability: leaders must understand that the successes of a group, the availability of members, and the group goal need to be conveyed. For community-based leadership to work, the community must know you exist. Leaders should:

• outline who they want to know about the organization. Think of how they can continue to broaden their audience;
• be able to convey the essence of the organization in a press release;
• make communication educational. What will an audience learn from reading or listening to a message?;
• be frequent and consistent in messages. There are a lot of messages competing for an audience’s attention; to avoid being forgotten, an organization must not neglect communication opportunities. Don’t confuse the audience by sending out conflicting information."

The KLCC experience has found that leaders were best equipped to influence change when they learned and understood the complexities of community context (history, culture, demographics, politics, economics, etc.). Leaders cannot be effective in addressing a situation unless the full picture is brought into focus. Otherwise, different community members who might have participated or given good feedback could be alienated unintentionally. Being fully involved in community action means that the whole community, not fractions of it, must be understood. Clarifying issues and continuously articulating and reinforcing them helps leaders distinguish between group action and individual action. Individuals comprise the group, but more is accomplished when every individual in the group is dedicated to reaching the same basic goals.