Foreword

Our fascination with strong individual leadership in the United States has prompted a collective wish for more, especially in civic life. We think about past leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and we long for what they offered: courage, vision, passion, and the ability to move people. However, when honoring leaders' legacy turns into a yearning for heroes, we can come to believe that leadership is the exclusive province of a few extraordinary individuals. The rest of us then may think of ourselves as incapable of making a direct contribution to creating a better world.

Perhaps there is another, more constructive way to frame outstanding individual leadership. We might, for example, look at these leaders as the embodiment of collective efforts, as representative of all of the ordinary individuals who support or supported their work, who engaged in courageous action and made extraordinary things happen. What if leaders really are only the most visible sign of the joint work of communities and groups with the courage, vision, and passion to authorize themselves and others to take up the work of leadership? This alternative way of thinking, already present in cultures where both collective and individual values are appreciated, is also taking root in some circles of leadership scholarship in the United States. And it is increasingly prevalent among committed members of many community organizations engaged in extraordinary leadership work.

Since 2001, the team at the Research Center for Leadership in Action (RCLA) at NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service has engaged in extensive research "with leaders on leadership," through the research and documentation component (R&D) of the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World (LCW) program. Since 2001, the LCW program has recognized and supported individuals and groups around the United States who exemplify community leadership at its best, acknowledging that leadership comes in many forms and from many places. LCW program participants come from social change organizations that address diverse issue areas, ranging from fighting environmental degradation to organizing communities around economic and social justice, from building leadership in immigrant communities to promoting cross-cultural understanding through the arts. These leaders work on topics as varied as government accountability, education reform, and sexual health education.

LCW's primary goal has been to change the conversation about leadership in this country by showcasing the abundance of effective leadership among communities in the most varied regions of the country. To support this goal, LCW's R&D component, led by the RCLA team, studies and documents the leadership experiences with LCW participants. Grounded in the practice of these participants, the R&D team co-generates new knowledge by focusing on leadership work that has been relatively ignored in the field. In addition to capturing new voices, RCLA develops partnerships with leaders in the field to document, interpret, and disseminate insights from their experience--particularly how their "learned wisdom" has influenced and enhanced their leadership. These partnerships have deepened our understanding of the collective and community dimensions of leadership in the United States, broadened the base of the existing field of leadership studies, and nurtured the work of social change leaders.

The results of this collaborative research confirm that leadership abounds. We just have to look for it in the right places and with the right lenses! And much can be learned from doing so. Once we think of leadership as a process in which people come together to pursue change, and in doing so, collectively develop a shared vision of what the world (or some part or corner of it) should look like, we can distill important lessons by capturing how communities make sense of their experience and how they shape their decisions and actions.

This way of thinking about leadership grounds the LCW R&D agenda and yields insights that illuminate the collective dimension of leadership practices as well as the role that community plays in the process. These insights have shown that leadership roles may be taken on by one individual or by several and that roles may also be rotated or shared. This lens also helps place highly visible leaders--who so capture our imagination--within a broader and richer context by seeing their contributions in relationship to those of other valuable players.

We trust that the Educasting materials included in this package are insightful and relevant to your practice as experienced or emerging leaders and/or as students and teachers of leadership. The audio recordings contain interviews with LCW program participants. They are not so much aimed at teaching ways to be leaders, but rather at helping to better understand and approach the work of leadership as a collective practice. The discussion questions and exercises are based on leadership themes, such as strategic planning, decision making, visioning, collaboration, and leadership development, which emerged from the work of LCW's R&D team with LCW participants. We hope that by introducing these leaders' voices into classrooms and providing exercises based on a variety of leadership themes, we will both challenge and facilitate your thinking about what constitutes leadership. Our vision is that out of this exercise will come the realization that we all have something to contribute to the process of making the world a better place.

*RCLA's ultimate goal is to work with practitioners to generate new and cutting-edge knowledge that advances leadership theory and practice to support systems and organizations that are effective, transparent, inclusive, and fair. For a detailed description of our various programs, please see our website at http://www.nyu.edu/wagner/leadership.