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Our Sponsors
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Thank you to the Santa Barbara Foundation for their generosity in providing scholarship funds to make the Courage to Lead program financially accessible for Santa Barbara County nonprofit executive leaders.
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Courage to Lead Alumni
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Cindy Burton
PathPoint
Leigh Curran
Virginia Avenue Project
Nancy Edmundson
Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara
Beverly Engel
Author
Esther Feldman
Community Conservancy International
Colette Hadley
Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara
Judy Hawkins
Nonprofit Support Center
Maria W. Long
Consultant
Julie Lopp
InternShop
Ernesto Paredes
EasyLift
Cecilia Rodriguez
CALM
Niki Sandoval
Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians
Jarrod Schwartz
Just Communities
Monica Spear
Girls Inc. of Santa Barbara
Janet L. Stanley
Free Spirit
Melinda Staveley
Cottage Rehabilitation Hospital
Sigrid Wright
Community Environmental Council
Jonathan Zeichner
A Place Called Home
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Greetings!
Welcome to our first Courage to Lead e-newsletter, where we plan to share news and views about our California-based program that nurtures and invests in our nonprofit leaders. We hope you will read it, respond to things written here, and forward it on to nonprofit execs that might value a leadership development and renewal experience among a cohort of peers like the one we provide.
Our next Courage to Lead cohort begins in late April, and applications are due by the end of February.
Thanks for your support!
Ken Saxon
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Thoughts from Ken
Leadership can be a lonely place.
My professional background was as a business entrepreneur. Even with a partner, the fact is that I was often in the seat of making tough calls on the fly, with so many people in my organization looking to me for the answers or to show confidence in challenging times. Though I loved being a leader, it was often stressful and I didn't have much balance i my life.
One way I dealt with this situation was by joining an organization called TEC (now Vistage). Each month, I spent a full day with 13 other small company CEO's. We would learn together and share our big professional and personal challenges with each other. It was a group I learned that I could trust, and filled with people that could relate to my concerns.
I've lived in Santa Barbara for 14 years now, and have worked with lots of nonprofit organizations and their leaders. Frankly, I think they have harder jobs than I did wehn I ran my business. They have multiple bottom lines to manage to (a business bottom line and a social one), and in addition, they report to a volunteer board that may or may not understand their proper role.
Many of the nonprofit leaders I've met over the years never planned to be in leadership. I went to business school to help prepare me for running a growing organization, but many nonprofit leaders have had no such preparation.
Given how important these leaders are to critical organizations in our communities, you'd think as a sector that we would flood them with resources to invest in themselves and their people, to build their capacity to effectively promote their missions. You might think that, but you'd be sadly mistaken.
I've been shocked for years at how small professional development budgets are at the nonprofit organizations I see. And of course when the economy got bad and cuts needed to be made, what was the first area in the budget people cut? Professional development. This seems backwards to me. At a time when everyone is being asked to do more with less, it seems to me this is a time to invest more resources in the people we have, not fewer.
This human investment is part of the reason I founded the Courage to Lead program. If we want to grow in our effectiveness as a sector, we must invest in all our people, and particularly our leaders. Otherwise, we are not creating sustainable organizations, nor are we investing in building a nonprofit sector that can reliably produce excellence.
When my organization is stuck in a bind, my experience is that I find the best solutions when I step out of the box - maybe into a good conference where best practices are being shared, or engaging openly among peers about our challenges. To do less of that and to turn inward in hard times is self-defeating.
In the group of 20 nonprofit executive leaders that just completed our first Courage to Lead 13-month leadership and renewal series, our participants (mostly ED's) built a powerful peer group typified by very high levels of trust and mutual support. And they engaged together around deep themes of leadership, as well as took time to renew themselves so they would have more to give all those who count on them.
Of course Courage to Lead is just one small philanthropic effort working to make up for the chronic underinvestment in the people of the nonprofit sector. Much more needs to be done. Fortunately some other grantmakers, like the Santa Barbara Foundation and the members of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) are also committing funds to such critical investments in people.
Leadership doesn't have to be so lonely. As a matter of fact, it can provide a fantastic set of themes and real life experiences to engage, alone and among peers. And through such engagement, we learn about ourselves, our impact on others, and how we can be more effective and inspiring in the broader world.
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Sigrid Wright, CTL participant
Refueling the Engine
I often joke that by day, my job is to save the planet, and that makes a body pretty tired. It's a tongue-in-cheek comment, but the joys and heartaches of working for the last 20 years on regional solutions to global environmental issues are real.
The timing of the first Courage to Lead workshop couldn't have been better. I'd just managed the production of my 10th+ Earth Day Festival, and had been intimately involved in guiding our non-profit through a complete overhaul of its mission, programs, Board, staff, funding streams, and business model - a five-year effort that left everyone feeling pretty beat. The image that I had at that time was of a core group of us trying to quickly lay down a new track for the organization, while intermittently jumping into the train's engine room to shovel coal.
That was a pretty ironic image, given that our new mission was to move the Santa Barbara region away from fossil fuels in one generation. As I launched into the Courage to Lead program, I decided to work with that. Let's see -- my organization's strategy for moving Santa Barbara away from unsustainable, short-term energy sources was to emphasize renewable energy, conservation and more efficient uses of energy. Ah, interesting!
So that's where I went. I explored how to create more moments of renewal, how to be more strategic and efficient with my limited energy, how to find the balance between jumping in when I needed to and conserving when I didn't.
That new track wasn't as easy to lay down as I hoped it would be at first - there are old habits and mindsets to deal with, and people in my life who would probably prefer me to keep chugging in the same way at the same speed. But over nearly 18 months of Courage to Lead sessions, I worked with this new strategy quite a bit - and in the end, felt like I had at least found some moments of leading the train without always serving as its engine.
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Parker Palmer Conferences
Parker J. Palmer, the founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal and the Courage to Lead program across the country, is a noted speaker and writer and author of such books as A Hidden Wholeness, Let Your Life Speak, and The Courage to Teach.
In 2010, there will be two opportunities to engage with him in retreat and conference around the themes of his book-in-progress, "The Politics of the Brokenhearted." You can learn more about these two opportunities at this link.
The conference invitation in Parker's words:
If you believe in the promise of democracy and lament the ways ours is falling short; if you want to rethink citizenship at a time when divisiveness is weakening "we the people" while other powers run the show; if you want to renew your own sense of the common good-and learn how to help others do the same in the places where you live and work - we'd like you to join us.
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What is Courage to Lead?
Those of us engaged in leadership, community service, and social change know the challenge of sustaining ourselves and our commitment to deeply held values and beliefs. The more passionate we are about our work, the more vital it is that we take time to renew our own spirits -- to reflect on the wellsprings of our service to others -- to reconnect who we are with what we do. And in this process, we also benefit from the development of a trusted peer group for mutual support and inspiration. The Courage to Lead program is designed to provide just this type of nurturing environment for nonprofit executive leaders.
The Courage to Lead program: - Renews heart, mind and spirit through exploration of the inner life of leaders.
- Reconnects to one's identity and integrity - identifying and honoring gifts and strengths, and acknowledging limits.
- Provides the rare opportunity to slow down and reflect about questions of meaning, purpose, vision and service.
- Explores reflective practices that help sustain spirit and vocational vitality and inform one's life and leadership.
- Creates a safe and trustworthy community of peers that supports the inner journey and strengthens participants for their work in the world.
Courage to Lead retreats provide space and quiet so that we can begin to hear our inner voice. The practice of reflection, journaling, and deep listening are part of the fabric of our approach. In his book A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer describes Courage work as "creating a space that both safeguards and encourages the inner journey."
Working in such a space, participants gain opportunities to renew personal identity, professional integrity, and vocational vitality. Meeting quarterly in retreat with a group of other nonprofit leaders provides the opportunity to build a deep and trusted community of peers. And our monthly Leader Circles allow participants to continue the work and reinforce their learnings between meetings in a small group environment.
If you want to learn more, or inquire about our new retreat series beginning in late April 2010, please contact Ken Saxon at ksaxon@silcom.com or 805-884-9223.
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Ken Saxon
Courage to Lead
105 E. De La Guerra Street, Ste. 8
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
phone -- (805) 884-9223
fax -- (805) 426-4691
email -- ksaxon@silcom.com
website -- www.couragetoleadnp.org
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