Over the 100 plus years of its use, the term social capital has acquired different meanings depending on the context of its usage-economics, politics, sociology. At the risk of oversimplifying the concept, I like Wikipedia’s succinct definition of social capital: “the advantages available to a person or group of people through their position in a network of relationships.” Impact Brokers (IB) is very interested in the social capital of both its members and its members’ constituents.  read more »

I recently had the opportunity to attend a Global Youth Leadership Summit in Salzburg, Austria. The customs agent laughed when I said I was going to a “youth” summit so I had to explain that I was invited to attend as faculty. I was asked to bring a leadership lens to support 42 young people from all over the world who were coming together to engage in scenario planning for the year 2030. (The Salzburg Seminars are an amazing opportunity if you are not familiar with them, www.salzburgseminar.org). The scenario model process facilitated by Lawrence Wilkenson, Global Business Networks, looked at four quadrants of potential scenarios along 2 dimensions, the human divide and the future of the planet. I was humbled by the sense of urgency with which the group of 20- to 30-year-old leaders tackled the global issues of human divide and the environment, developing action plans that connected their own work in ministries, as journalists, as community organizers, and as academics to these issues.  read more »

Welcome to the Impact Brokers virtual learning laboratory where your thoughtful input is seriously welcome! What is Impact Brokers (IB), you ask? In a nutshell, IB is a radically different way of ‘doing’ social change. We are a group of nonprofit organizations, funders, consultants, and community members who have been meeting since January 2008 to solve complex social problems together by identifying common issues, discovering root causes and strengthening our collaborative capacity for change. We meet quarterly for Learning Community Meetings to, among other things, review individual and shared capacity building projects and otherwise strengthen our relationships for the benefit of the whole.

LLC awarded IB’s Boston Member Circle a Community Seed grant to support an online learning lab to explore the themes of social capital and networks within the framework of adaptive and collective leadership. If you are choking on that sentence like I am, here’s a Heimlich: we’re going to deepen our understanding of what we do and how we do it so that we can capitalize on our relationships for the benefit of all involved.

So, to christen this learning laboratory, we want to talk a bit about leadership and, specifically leadership that is not carried out by one person. For in the IB Boston Member Circle, there purposely is no one leader. In A New Look at Leadership in Collaborative Networks: Process Catalysts, Mandell and Keast write that leadership in collaborative networks is “the process of getting all members to interact in new ways that tap into their strengths” and that “leadership…is about focusing on the processes of building a new whole rather than primarily focusing on more efficient ways to deliver services.”  read more »

Greetings from Momentum 2008 put on by the Tides Center. The format this year is inspired by TED and is packed with inspirational folks. Stay tuned for missives from the gathering. In the meantime, checkout the conference site and its WiserEarth page.

LLC recently funded two Community Seed Fund projects that will explore and assess different learning approaches about how to cultivate and support learning communities.  read more »

For anyone interested in creating and sustaining breakthrough change, you may want to read a fascinating article by Matthew Chin entitled Sustainability and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (September 2003). Matthew runs Operations Success Programs with the Primary Care Development Corporation, an organization that helps health centers and clinics form learning collaboratives to achieve and sustain transformational change in serving the poor, the uninsured, and the under-insured in New York City.

After years of implementing a highly successful organizational learning model in diverse health centers and clinics, he and his colleagues became interested in why clinics and health centers have a hard time sustaining the gains that they made. He discovered that leadership was critical to long-term success.  read more »

Observations on the “I” Fear Factor and the Hopeful “We”

Six weeks after 9/11 I found myself at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association. We were all shell-shocked and eager for a chance to talk, heal and try to make some meaning of what was going on. An impromptu panel session formed over lunch as a number of scholars shared their thoughts and concerns about 9/11 and its aftermath. One speaker’s comments stuck with me and were unfortunately played out in the months that would follow. Jean Lipman Blumen talked about what occurs in a climate of fear and our willingness to abdicate leadership as we look for a savior and hand over our authority for the promise of safety. Of course during the years that followed, we saw Congress give new authority to the white house and our civil rights being slowly eroded as we responded to the promise, “I will make America safe.”  read more »

We are holding Creating Space in New Orleans in 2009. What will it mean for us to be there? What can we learn? What do we bring? I have been thinking a lot recently about the power of place, about the stories that are layered in our environment that we are unaware of, especially the stories of those who have been excluded from history -- whose stories are invisible to us but are still etched in the land. What are those stories? What can they teach us? How do our lives embody these stories even when we are unaware of them?  read more »