Ingredients for Social Change: Lessons From a Philanthropy’s Coaching Sessions

The Blandin Foundation’s formula for training community leaders in rural areas relies on several key principles.

One is that anyone can be a leader—leadership is not something that requires an official title. Another is that rural residents do not usually need outside help to keep their communities healthy; they can bring people together on their own to solve local problems.

But the Blandin Community Leadership Program, operated by the northern Minnesota foundation, is also based on the idea that there is an art to effective leadership, and it involves three fundamental tools:

• Defining an issue in a way that will lead to effective action.
• Creating social capital—developing and maintaining relationships with people who can help bring about change.
• Pulling together enough people, money, and other resources to achieve a specific result.

Blandin’s program—which outlines specific attributes of a healthy community, such as economic opportunity and environmental stewardship—uses discussions, exercises, and games to help participants think about how to select a problem to tackle. Those efforts also help participants identify the people, organizations, resources, and money that would be assets, as well as the potential obstacles; assess who would be affected by their efforts and how they would react; and measure progress.

For example, one exercise asks participants to imagine they are members of a committee that is trying to help pass a school-bond referendum. The trainers scatter 12 large squares on the floor that have certain skills or abilities printed on them—for example, public relations, accounting, and links to school boards or state agencies. They then ask participants to stand on the square that matches their qualifications. If there are gaps in the abilities that would be needed to form an effective committee, they then consider whether they can fill those from beyond the group.

One member who participated in a training program for the Mille Lacs area of Minnesota earlier this year—Linda Osburn, a lawyer—says she learned from the Blandin exercises the importance of describing an issue in the right way. For example, she said, advocates of a controversial proposal to consolidate two school systems in her area should use the term “school collaboration” instead of “school consolidation.”

“It’s not getting rid of something,” she says, “it’s bringing out the best we have.”

New Approaches

Research shows that the training changes the way the participants approach community problems. For example, the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, in St. Paul, in 2009 surveyed 235 alumni of the Blandin Community Leadership Program and a related program that trains leaders on Indian reservations.

When describing their leadership activities, 76 percent of the alumni said they often or very often identified their community’s key assets, up from 26 percent before the training; 74 percent said they listened to others and gave them a voice on community issues, up from 26 percent; and 63 percent said they worked to cultivate the strengths of other people, up from 12 percent.

One element that is critical to the community-leadership program’s success, foundation officials and trainers say, is an initial five-day immersion session, in which participants spend intensive time with each other away from their communities and jobs.

The group stays at a resort, an effort to reinforce the idea that participants have as much leadership potential as chief executives or board members who might spend time in such fancy digs, says Bill Mease, who has worked as an outside trainer for the Blandin program for more than 20 years.

The philosophy is that “everybody’s a leader,” he says. “Our job is just to take the rust off.”

Participants also deepen their connections after five days of eating together, doing exercises, and playing games.

“There becomes a fluency in how they talk with one another that doesn’t happen in a three-hour workshop,” says Victor Klimoski, a Blandin trainer. “I’m always surprised at people who say, This is the first time in my life I’ve had this kind of conversation with people.”