Community Leadership: What Does it Take to See Results?

Abstract

If your community is looking for more committed and competent leaders, what type of educational intervention will get the best results? U-Lead, the University of Minnesota Extension's community leadership program, engages with organizations and communities to strengthen leadership. As the educational provider of U-Lead, Extension has a responsibility to provide quality programs as well as honor time and resource constraints. The primary question of this study is: what impact, if any, does the program duration have on participant outcomes? Key Observations include (a) the longest duration programs consistently had the most improvements in skills and knowledge, (b) after completing programs, more people are committing to leadership positions. This does not appear to correlate to program duration, (c) using evaluation data for modifying programs and starting additional programs leads to more significant participant change, and (d) community leadership theory and measurement can lead to better programs with greater results.

Evaluating a College Leadership Course: What do Students Learn in a Leadership Course with a Service-Learning Component and How Deeply do They Learn It?

“…It would be useful to understand whether these students were able to take their learnings from this course and continue to apply and develop them during their tenure as students, or later as employees, graduate students, and so forth. Previous research has found that the longer students work on their leadership skills, the more skill and knowledge outcomes are expected (Schefferet, 2007). Continued data collection over the course of these students' tenure in the university and beyond would yield a better understanding of whether students were able to use the learnings of this course and build on them in their lives.…”

Re-Imagining Community Leadership Development in the Post-Industrial Era

“…The amount of time spent involved in a program matters to overall outcomes achieved. Participants in programs with a greater amount of curriculum time had higher improvements in leadership skill development than participants in programs with less time (Apaliyah & Martin, 2013;Scheffert, 2007) (Azzam & Riggio, 2003;Porr, 2011;Wituk et al, 2005). Additionally, the income of participants in CLPs tended to be in the middle to middle to upper middle-class range.…”

“…Similarly, programs in Minnesota have a wide range of duration from five to 18 months (Scheffert, 2007). The total amount of hours that participants spend in programs is challenging to identify due to the broad variance of program lengths, however, one study across California CLPs found the average time involved to be 70 hours (Azzam & Riggio, 2003) among participants and often require participants to take time away from their employment to participate (Willis & Stoecker, 2013).…”