ILB will be providing training and development for community leaders and help for communities to reach support and partnership from organizations inside and outside the community. Key to this concept is that community leaders will be trained to identify and solve community problems on their own terms rather than depending upon externally imposed solutions, as has been ineffective in the past.
Achievements and a Challenging Opportunity
Since its start in 2003, ILB has focused on promoting awareness and the need for a mindset change--a new kind of leadership approach in Brazil, especially community transformational leadership3. Through multiple presentations, seminars, and courses, the Institute has successfully exposed this ILB model along with new leadership approaches to over 4000 people in Brazil, representing multiple organizations from the government, business, and social sectors. The receptivity to the concept and new leadership approaches has been overwhelming.
As a result of this initial effort a special door of opportunity has been opened for leadership development in the social sector of Brazil. Approximately six years ago the Military Police Department and the Security Secretary of the State of Sao Paulo initiated, a successful statewide strategy aimed at integrating efforts within communities to improve the quality of life and safety.4 In this strategy police officers and community residents are called upon to dedicate volunteer time for community work. This represents a major shift in the philosophy and strategies to fight rising social problems and crime in Brazil. As a result, a new mission statement was defined for the Military Police Department in its community policing. The mission statement includes, “searching for the solution of common problems of society, through an integrated participation of the community, seeking to rescue the values of good coexistence and human solidarity.” Since the start of this program, 780 community councils have been successfully created throughout the State. ILB has been invited to support this major statewide4 program. The institute has conducted a series of seminar sessions, including a short training session of 500 community leaders.
ILB is now being asked to support the development of a comprehensive leadership training program involving all 780 communities in the State. For each community it is being planned that at least 12 community leaders should be trained -- to ensure that a critical leadership mass is empowered and equipped to carry out an effective and sustainable community transformation effort. Overall this challenging effort should involve the training of over 8000 community leaders, in the State of Sao Paulo alone. A community leadership model is expected to be developed in Sao Paulo that can, eventually, be extended to other parts of Brazil.
To this end ILB has developed a strategic partnership with World Servants International (WSI)5. WSI is an organization specializing in Community Leadership Training (CLT). This training approach has been tested worldwide and is perfectly applicable to the Brazilian context. The complete CLT program consists of five basic courses, including a total of 16 modules, of about 4 hours each. The CLT program can be completed by participating community leaders approximately one and one-half years. ILB and WSI has trained about 30 CLT facilitators ILB is now ready to start delivery of the CLT training program to local social services entities. These facilitators (see Photo below) consist mostly of students participating in the APU’s Masters Degree in Organizational Leadership here in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Leadership Institute of Brazil – First Team of Trained Facilitators, 2005
The uniqueness of the WSI/ILB Community Leadership Training program is its Experiential Learning, Storyteller, and Servant leadership approaches. In these approaches ILB facilitators play a very different role than the conventional trainers.
Several other Brazilian organizations and government institutions have already expressed strong interest in bringing the program to their area of activities, including two state governments. AMCHAM Brazil, Project Management Institute of Sao Paulo (PMISP), are among the organizations with which partnership possibilities are being discussed. ILB envisions that this training concept will eventually be extended nationwide, bringing meaningful impact on communities’ transformation, with a particular focus on fighting poverty.
Major Strategic Challenges and Considerations
While the opportunity to develop and consolidate this pilot program in the State of Sao Paulo is unique, ILB , as expected, faces the challenge of raising funds to sustain the costs involved with a training program of this magnitude. This is true especially considering that the communities involved are typically poor and government funds, if available, are limited. These capital limitations are exacerbated by the insurmountable bureaucracy and the tendencies to be politically tied. These influences are often conflicting with real program objectives.
To this end ILB is currently bringing together leaders of local business communities to engage them through active participation, and sponsoring, scholarships for community leaders elected for the CLT training. Positive responses are beginning to happen. A major difficulty of integrating the business sector is that they tend to have their own agendas and priorities, which, at times, conflict with the best interests of the training program. Other parallel efforts are also being developed at national and international levels to obtain support for the program. We find appropriate to highlight that, to stay in track with ILB’s mission and vision, the Institute has a firm commitment to be non-political or religiously bound.
Dr. James McGregor Burns in his interview with Harvard’s magazine Compass – A Journal of Leadership.(1) emphasizes that ‘the toughest problem facing the globe, namely global poverty, is a very complex problem’, where ‘the central failure of past approaches rose from the assumption that money and technology were essential and even total keys to overcoming poverty’. Dr. Burns then highlights two fundamental guidelines for the effectiveness of any program to fight poverty, which ILB embraces; namely:
· The commitment to “create local leadership development programs where the whole point would be to recruit, to develop, and to train local leaders who would stay after the training volunteers are left, is ‘by far the most important’ condition”. This is one of the key guidelines for the ILB’s CLT program through the creation of the regional leadership centers and community action leadership group, as shown in the figures of Attach A.
· The importance of “the need to know where the resources are. There are a huge number of resources in this world, but they are of no use to many people because the connection is not there”. Awareness and relationships, as Dr. Burns’s points, are key.
Conclusion
ILB believes that an effective community is a place where:6:
· leadership occurs whenever and wherever necessary;
· anyone willing to serve has the opportunity—with access to training—to do so;
· a critical mass of leaders is available from within the community and committed to it;
· an environment wherein collaborative , creative, and servant leadership can flourish;
· diversity and inclusiveness are valued.
ILB, as a group of individuals highly committed to social transformation, firmly believes that the biggest poverty and hunger Brazil has is not for the essential needs of food, health, and housing, but, primarily spiritual and for dignity. Dignity that comes through education, knowledge, hope, and opportunities. The greatest dignity, however, will come because of the newly created self-leadership capacity among the communities’ social sectors. And this is what the ILB is committed to.
References & Observations:
(1) James MacGregor Burns, Compass – A Journal of Leadership, Fall 2003, Vol. 1 pg. 5-8. Dr. Burns is a Pulitzer award winner for his seminal book Leadership, 1978 among many others. His most recent one with a focus on ‘Fighting Global Poverty’ is Transformational Leadership, 2004.
(2) Dr. Jean Lipman Blumen, (2002) ‘The PAL Concept – Partnership for the Advancing of Leadership’ unpublished manuscript. Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, Institute for the Advancing Studies in Leadership.
(3) Leadership and People, HSM Management, Brazil, January 2004, Vol. 42 pg 23: this prime Brazilian management and leadership magazine published the results of recent research on leadership styles of 62 countries showing that in a scale of 0 to 100 (where 0 represents the most democratic style and 100 the most authoritarian style) Brazil ranks 75th - one of the highest. Thirty years ago Brazil’s position was 69th.. This shows a surprising increase in the authoritarian style.
(4) The State of Sao Paulo with less than 20% of total Brazil population (197Million) generates 49% of Brazil’s industrial GDP. The city of Sao Paulo, with 17 Million people generates 53% of the industrial output of the State.
(5) World Servants International is a world organization dedicated to community leadership development operating since 1986 on four continents.
(6) Adapted from ‘Power & Principles of Collaborative Leadership, Lorraine Matusak & Mary Green, J.M.Burns Academy of Leadership, News & Tools, 2005
