Inspiring Leadership in Immigrant Communities - ILRC

Inspiring Leadership in Immigrant CommunitiesJanuary 2003• Recruit one or more of the leaders to be on a leadership and civic participation advisoryboard for your organization.• Conduct regular meetings—monthly or quarterly—among the leaders to plan activities,socialize, receive updates, strategize and network.• Dedicate your organization to making leadership training and civic participationprojects as well as the follow up work to be part of your organization’s mission, longtermstrategy and fundraising plan.§ 10.2 Example: Centro BilngueCentro Bilingue, a grassroots, immigrant-led group in East Palo Alto, Calif., conducted a multiyearcommunity immigrant leadership training project. Centro proposed the following plan to keepits leaders and volunteers involved in doing community work:To ensure the long-term existence of the leadership project, the leaders need to become integratedinto the inner workings and decision-making of Centro Bilingue. By becoming an integral part ofthe structure of Centro they will gain a stake in the organization’s future success and viability.Presently the leaders are doing community work for Centro. However, they need to be able to callCentro their own so that the organization can spread out the responsibility for staffing and runningthe organization.To integrate the leaders into Centro, the board, staff, volunteers, leaders and an outside consultantwill devise a strategic plan for Centro. The plan will do at least the following:• Re-examine and reaffirm the mission of Centro.• Create goals to carry out the mission.• Create SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) objectives tomeet the goals.• Create projects to meet the objectives.• Decide when, how and by whom the projects will be accomplished.The strategic planning meetings will be attended by the board, leaders, staff and other activevolunteers. Additionally, these same people will organize either monthly or bi-monthly meetingsduring the next year and during subsequent years to discuss Centro’s work, development issues andstrategic plan progress, including the best ways to continue incorporating leaders and volunteers.With the help of some of the leaders and volunteers, Centro will raise funds to continue leadershiptraining and civic participation training. The benefits of the first two years of the leadership projectwill be greatly enhanced if a third year is funded because all the skills learned and practiced duringthe first two years will be refined and used within the community to a far greater extent, especiallybecause the leaders will use these skills to help Centro’s long-term success. Also since the leaderswho went through the trainings during the first two years of the project will help out as co-trainersfor the new training, everyone will learn and benefit from what the project has alreadyaccomplished. By training the original group of leaders how to teach leadership skills to others, the10-2