Exercising Community-Engaged Leadership Requires Taking Risks and Making Sacrifices
There are many compelling reasons for building a community-centered program that declares that we need a new form of leadership in order to address the messes of our world.
On a recent weekend I was privileged to observe two of Cornell’s more advanced facilitators, Dustin Liu and Silvia Trevino, lead our Community-Engaged Leadership Retreat for 12 of their peers. The retreat was a sharing space led by these two Engaged Ambassadors who serve through the Office of Engagement Initiatives and who have earned the Certificate in Engaged Leadership. Their undergraduate peers were about to commit to projects co-led by their community partners through our community-engaged leadership program. As these students considered how to build authentic relationships and enduring campus-community partnerships, dialogue turned to how to facilitate high-performing teams and the leadership qualities of risk-taking and sacrifice. Were these students willing to risk popularity, income, or personal achievement by committing to the leadership of off-campus communities?
When not fostering concrete skills, also that day our Engaged Ambassadors facilitated dialogues on the mindsets that our program promotes. While these mindsets provide OEI staff and stakeholders — including our students — with a foundation, the questions that guided the design of our program three years ago have served as a powerful fulcrum and lever for initially lifting our goals toward our vision. In spring 2016 when we developed, and fall when we launched the program, these questions were:
How can we model inclusivity and community voice (and other mindsets) in the design stage? It was through the intentional design process in spring 2016 that we coined the phrase engaged leadership and aligned our vision with Cornell’s historical commitment to public engagement. What emerged was and is a program that promotes leadership with a public purpose. Some local community leaders led a retreat for our design team of 24 students. As one alum member of the team recently shared with me, it was learning to “listen to community” in these design sessions that allowed him to “learn more in the last semester then the previous three-and-a-half years at Cornell.”
What emerged was and is a program that promotes leadership with a public purpose.
Inclusive design also meant for us including students and community members as co-educators. The student design team promoted the mentoring dimension of our program in 2016 when they unequivocally stated in our landscape scan that even with its fierce competitive nature, Cornell students often give effort to peer mentoring relationships. Now, during our Community-Engaged Leadership Retreats, we offer concrete ideas and tools on how to build a mentorship family, agree on the outcomes of the shared project, and listen to feedback offered by our mentors.
Given the leadership landscape that exists at Cornell, what would distinguish a community-engaged leadership program from all other leadership opportunities? Cornell has a wealth of seasoned leadership educators and community engagement practitioners, and the Engaged Leadership program intends to complement — rather than displace — established courses and programs. We designed the community-engaged leadership program to be a universal adapter into which students can plug their community-engaged learning, research, and leadership experiences, while amplifying the work of university faculty and staff. Our leadership retreat provides universal tools, for example our Community Benefits Agreement, a conversation guide for what might appear to be a risky conversation with one’s committed community partner.
The universal tool upon which our program rests is our critical reflection framework. Critical reflection supports students in drawing closer to their purpose, becoming more self-directed learners, and challenging their own assumptions that stand in the way of making the change that they want to see. Students qualify to attend our leadership retreat based on their resolve to critically reflect on their experiences after completing 40 hours of community involvement, attending various leadership skill-building workshops, and meeting with peer mentors. We believe that there are certain questions that best support an “involved” student taking action before our retreat, and best questions that best support a “committed” student after our retreat — regardless of their academic discipline, form of community engagement, or recent leadership education
What questions might guide our program participants in integrating their activities and studies inside and outside the classroom? In designing the program collaboratively with students, staff, community partners, and faculty, we crowdsourced the most appropriate guiding questions with our student design team and in faculty and staff feedback sessions the summer before our program launch. One question proposed and eventually adopted for “advanced leaders” was the role of risk and sacrifice inherent to commitment to our communities, our groups, and to our own lifelong learning and leadership development. Employing the language of threshold concepts e.g. risk, sacrifice, power, positionality, critical reflection and reciprocity, and we emphasize the transfer of learning (and its limits) from one place to the next. We encourage students to project what it might look like to use our program’s architecture wherever they move post-Cornell as they get involved, make a commitment to a group, and then build coalitions with other groups through dialogue.
We encourage students to project what it might look like to use our program’s architecture wherever they move post-Cornell…
What questions are emerging for us? As students at Cornell move at their own pace from being involved in, to making a commitment to their communities, the questions upon which we want them to critically reflect on will shift. Likewise, as we wrap up the third full year of our engaged leadership program, our initial questions have shifted to other concerns, particularly around our threshold concepts of risk and sacrifice. Do we as a community of leadership educators believe that for students to have an increased ability to bring about the world they wish to see, within the many communities they will inhabit throughout their lives, that they must learn what risks and sacrifices they are willing to take and make?
Many students are weighted down by the enormity of the issues of our day: gender violence, climate change, economic inequality, and the tenuous and fractured state of our democracy, to name a few. Just as the question of purpose often stops students in their tracks, I am often faced with strained looks and nervous glances when I ask, “Are the actions you are taking commensurate with the severity of the problems we are facing?” Understanding which risks they are willing to take, and what they are willing to sacrifice — besides their time, the initial, standard student response — is a function of a student’s identity, past experiences, and values, to be sure.
As we continue to adapt our program design based on stakeholder feedback and evaluation of the expected outcomes we have framed in our logic model, it is exciting to challenge and support students in live into their public purpose, and to challenge ourselves to consider: If we are encouraging students to take risks in their leadership practice or community-engaged learning toward their vision, have we modeled for them how to do so, in pursuit of our own vision of the world as it ought to be?
