Leading Systems Change: A Workbook for Community Practitioners and Funders
Heather McLeod Grant & Adene Sacks
The New Leadership Network, 2019
Leading Systems Change: A Workbook for Community Practitioners and Funders chronicles the story of the “New Leadership Network” (NLN), a six-year experiment in community leadership and social change in Fresno and Stanislaus Counties of California. The program was funded by the James Irvine Foundation and engaged nearly 100 local leaders in developing new skills, mindsets, and tools to drive greater impact in their communities. The book provides funders and practitioners with a detailed case study, lessons learned, and tools for creating equity-centered systems change. To download the free workbook, or access additional online resources, please go to newleadershipnetwork.org/book.
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How can the engagement that helps keep a network healthy be supported over time? How do you help members stay connected and productive after the initial cohort program has ended? As we worked to shepherd both networks into this transitional phase, we stumbled plenty. We learned a lot, discovering a set of core elements that we believe help a network to become embedded and sustainable over time.
Embedding in the Community
In both communities, the Irvine Foundation provided two years of additional funding after the formal NLN program. While less expensive than the cohort-building portion, this phase was no less important. Because Fresno was the first NLN, we had no road map to follow, and we learned from our mistakes. At the time, we thought about network building and sustaining as sequential: First run the program and cross-weave the cohorts, then build the future container. In hindsight, waiting until the “end” to sustain NLN Fresno hampered its progress, which is why we took a different approach in Stanislaus, implementing these elements long before the formal program ended. In both communities, we eventually landed on a similar set of supports to sustain these networks over time, and we share some of them here.
Find a backbone organization. As noted in the workbook, one of the biggest lessons we learned from Fresno was the need to have a strong backbone organization in place from the start. The lack of a backbone in Fresno made it much harder to sustain the network once the formal program ended. But in Stanislaus, we partnered with the Community Foundation from the outset—and the difference this made is hard to overstate. Two of the foundation’s leaders and three board members went through the NLN program and helped guide the network at every stage of its growth. The foundation’s insight, support, and ownership of the network made the shift from building to sustaining far smoother than the experience in Fresno.
Nurture network governance. As the NLN Fresno cohorts came to a close, we established a steering committee, comprising elected representatives from each cohort, to help participants take more ownership over the network’s future. This committee helped decide what to focus on in the sustain phase, and how to allocate the additional two years of funding. In Stanislaus, we put an advisory council in place much earlier, during the second cohort. While the advisory council in Stanislaus also comprised diverse leaders, its members were self-selecting, making participation a good gauge of which leaders had energy to help lead the network going forward. In both communities, this governing body helped the network contemplate its future aspirations for impact, cross-weave cohorts, communicate to the community, and advise on plans for sustaining it. Additionally, in Stanislaus, the advisory council helped oversee a micro-grant fund that was set up to support projects with potential for larger impact.
Hire a network weaver. In both Fresno and Stanislaus, we hired a network weaver early on—a member of the network paid as a consultant to engage members, help connect them to one another and to other community efforts, and actively supporting design teams and collaborations. But while NLN Fresno’s weaver, Caty Perez, often found herself with the dual task of serving as both the weaver and backbone organization, NLN Stanislaus’ weavers—first Reggie Rucker, then Kate Trompetter—worked closely with the community foundation. As a result, they had more bandwidth to think strategically about member participation and to assist with network engagement, without having to take on many other tasks.
Cross-weave the cohorts. Another lesson from Fresno was to start weaving the full network early on. Tight-knit cohorts do not become a tight-knit network unless the pathway from one to the other is supported while the network is still developing. In Fresno, we had previous cohorts join each new cohort for a day at their final convening. In Stanislaus we started the work of cross-weaving the cohorts and nurturing a whole-group identity right after the second cohort graduated. In both communities, we engaged the members of earlier cohorts, inviting them to select events on the learning journey, enlisting them as coaches to design teams, and hosting “integration dinners” after each cohort graduated. All of these efforts became opportunities to establish a shared, network-wide agenda as the NLN was still forming.
Host informal meet-ups. Both NLNs have been intentional about creating ongoing social opportunities that bring the network together and give members a chance to connect outside of structured convenings and after the formal program ends. During the final two years in Fresno, the network held bimonthly dinners, cocktails, and breakfasts for network members to develop closer relationships across cohorts. In Stanislaus, this phase of the network is only just beginning—but we expect to see a similar pattern of ongoing convening and connecting happening there. A subset of NLN Fresno members continues to connect and collaborate.
Support collaboration. The network collaborations or projects in Fresno were more organic, and we didn’t have a lot of structure in place to support them. In Stanislaus, because we decided to emphasize design thinking from the outset, we set up an innovation fund at the Community Foundation to support work coming out of the design teams. As a result, NLN Stanislaus leaders had access to small grants that they could use to hire a consultant or coach, buy supplies, or pay for team activities. NLN Stanislaus focused energy on supporting the design teams in other ways as well. Several new projects emerged from ideas sparked during the cohort experience—such as an effort to try and establish a local incubator for food entrepreneurs—and these initiatives received paid coaching and staffing support.
Provide ongoing development. In Fresno, network members expressed an interest in having ongoing developmental opportunities over the final two years of the grant. They requested and were offered expert-led trainings on board governance, design thinking, strategic communications, and facilitative leadership, among other topics. The network also self-organized a two-day “capstone” event at which they reviewed everything they had learned and taught key modules from the NLN curriculum to one another, as a way to help codify and cement key frameworks. This event functioned a bit like a “train the trainers,” preparing NLN members to take what they had learned back into their own organizations and communities. In Stanislaus, the group held additional design workshops after their convenings to help NLN leaders begin applying human-centered design skills to larger community issues.
Facilitate peer learning. In Stanislaus, members have been less enthusiastic about bringing in outside trainers for ongoing professional development. Rather, they have chosen to create more peer consulting events, where NLN members come together at a leader’s request to help think through a specific challenge. One such peer consult focused on a challenge related to a homeless initiative led by an NLN member, while another consultation focused on water rights in Stanislaus. Network members brainstormed and prototyped ideas for addressing both challenges, adding fresh perspectives for the leaders to carry forward in their work.
Letting Go
During the sustain phase in both networks, our facilitation team aspired to recede further into the background and allow the network to lead itself—which proved easier in theory than in practice. In Fresno, the NLN was not initially ready for this transition, and the network struggled to determine its future. In Stanislaus, this was easier because network leadership was embedded in the backbone and the advisory council from the start.
Today, NLN Fresno participants continue to do powerful work in their community—work that is deeply informed by the new leadership approaches they now possess, by their increased confidence in their ability to impact larger systems, and by the relationships they forged through the work. But the group’s energy for stoking the flames of the network has largely burned off, with the formal aspects of the program tailing away, leaving behind residual relationships and a number of continuing community projects. As of this workbook’s publication in 2019, there is no formal NLN structure, although many of the members continue to collaborate on work together, and the network of relationships endures.
Stanislaus is just beginning to transition from the formal program to the sustain phase. As a result, the NLN Stanislaus advisory council is actively stewarding conversations about what the network can and should become. As Ruben Imperial, who is on the council, says, “Asking leaders to come and connect in a retreat-style format with other leaders doing some of the best work in our community was the original invitation. But what is the new invitation? What does it mean to be involved in NLN in the long term? What are we inviting people to?” These are big but vital questions designed to get members clear on what they are willing to do to strengthen the network going forward.
As a starting point, the Stanislaus advisory council has begun articulating the network’s values. “They are the principles that connect NLN members together, root us in our shared experience, create long-term sustainable change, and invite the community to come along,” says Kate Trompetter. The network is starting to define success on two levels: What they want to do, and what values they want to share and spread in their community. This has opened up a new way of thinking about network engagement; some members might be directly involved in the network’s work, while others might be more generally enrolled in its values.
NLN Stanislaus still faces its own set of challenges, with another year to go in its sustain phase. The Stanislaus Community Foundation is figuring out how the NLN nests within its larger programmatic work and what support it needs over the long term. The network will also need to decide whether it will stay a closed network or begin to integrate with other groups in the community that may help further its work. What is not contested, however, is that NLN Stanislaus is taking strong ownership of its work and impact—signaling not just a successful shift from learning toward action, but a likelihood that the network will continue to work toward systems change. “We want to make sure that this has longevity in our community and that we all keep prioritizing it and coming together to help each other,” says NLN Stanislaus member Amy Vickery, director of communications and legislative affairs for Stanislaus County. “We don’t want it to end.”
Lessons Learned
Design with the end in mind. It almost goes without saying, but one of the most important lessons we learned is the need to design for network sustainability from the outset. In Fresno, we didn’t really address how to embed and sustain the network until after the cohort experiences were done. In Stanislaus we started this process much earlier, with a dedicated community backbone, a network governing body, and more attention to embedding the work via design projects from the outset.
Allow design teams to morph. In Fresno, the cohort projects were less formal or structured and so they continued to evolve or dissolve organically. In Stanislaus, some of the design teams faded with time, some continued intact, and many merged or shifted focus, adding members from other cohorts and from outside of the network. We’re continuing to track the evolution of these teams to see how they adapt over time.
Create many ways to engage. For a network to remain strong, it needs a variety of touch points for different members. Some NLN members are interested primarily in continuing to deepen their relationships with others in the network. Others look to the network for more structured personal and professional development opportunities. Still others want to leverage the network for work that they are already doing or have begun as part of a design team. The goal in both Fresno and Stanislaus has been to serve all these needs over the life of the grant.
Secure long-term funding. Ideally networks should secure a minimum of two years of support, after the formal program, to embed the work in the community. Luckily the Irvine Foundation provided this, though we now realize that once the money ends, it’s hard to maintain the same level of network momentum; the work becomes more diffuse and organic, and less focused or intentional.