Kellogg Leadership for Community Change: Crossing Boundaries, Strengthening Communities

The KLCC initiative marked a shift from focusing on the development of individuals. It sought to actively engage citizenry in community issues and change. The vision of KLCC was to develop diverse community leadership that can work across boundaries—geographic, racial, cultural, age, class, or faith by mobilizing collective action to improve local conditions and the quality of life in their communities. Leadership, in this view, is not the purview of an individual leader, rather the collaboration of what leaders and followers do together for the common good. The KLCC initiative focused on the development of more than 25 diverse leadership Fellows in communities across the country. Each site was provided with technical assistance and opportunities to engage in evaluation within their sites and networking across a KLCC national learning community. The sites would learn and enact community-based, collective leadership as a developmental tool that is optimized in both a cultural and issue-related context grounded in the following core concepts: * Place-based leadership: Valuing the power of place, culture,and history * Crossing boundaries: Bringing together a full representationof the community to work together to move past barriers * Forming collective leadership: Helping the group understandand use their power as a collective force for sustaining change * Developing individual leadership: Helping individuals learn howto develop their own leadership that leads to collective action * Making change happen: Learning how to work together tobuild new relationships, create alliances, and influence change