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Community leadership development: the effects on community development

Last summer I had the privilege to join about 100 people with an interest in community leadership development at the Leadership Chautauqua in Morris, Minnesota. The day was filled with presentations and discussions covering a broad range of topics, most all of which dealt with how community developers could be building leadership capacity for community change more effectively. As an invited presenter, I spent much of my time “roaming” among the discussions, listening to what was being discussed. Often, participants expressed frustration with their efforts and how often there was so little to show for their work. While there may have been numerous reasons for the lack of observable change, it was also clear that there was a real need for better ways of assessing how these efforts built capacity. Did increased capacity, assuming it occurred, mean change happened to benefit the community? How do we know? Can we measure it? In an era of greater accountability and competition for resources, being able to measure this effect in a manner that generates political support can be terribly important. There is little doubt that improved and increased leadership capacity is needed in rural areas. As Bridger and Alter (2008) point out, the economic and social structures that are changing at the national and global levels have effects on even the most remote rural places. They argue that “leadership is crucial” to addressing these and other problems. How this is accomplished is addressed in this special issue of Community Development by focusing on the results achieved by community leadership development efforts as conducted by a number of different sponsoring organizations and institutions. The contents of this special issue on community leadership development and its effects were derived from presentations made at the 2010 CDS meetings in Boise, Idaho. A considerable amount of work has gone into each paper as, presentations at meetings being what they are, each author struggled with the task of putting together a reasonable argument with their supporting evidence and convincing reviewers there was something in each paper worth publishing. I have recently noted a number of other papers published in Community Development that dealt with community leadership and I applaud this work, given that this topic has been largely ignored within community development research for many years. This is in spite of the continuing efforts of practitioners to bring attention and resources to the task of leadership development of the sort that strengthens communities. The contents of this special issue demonstrate that there is diversity in this field and room for more contributions to be made. The article by Stoecker and Willis shows how difficult it is for community-based leadership development efforts to reach all possible audiences. They note that community-based advocacy organizations find these efforts, typically organized by state extension services or chambers of commerce, to be pretty irrelevant to their needs. Further, the perspective of the staff of these advocacy Community Development, 2013 Vol. 44, No. 4, 408–410, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15575330.2013.814699