Supporting Feminist Transformative Leadership:
Findings from Coady Institute’s Global Change Leaders Program Coady Institute has been supporting transformative women leaders through its Global Change Leaders (GCL) program since 2011. The program is designed for women from developing countries and indigenous communities to deepen their leadership capacities through a contextually relevant and in-depth program involving a seven-week residency as well as six months of follow-up support. Ongoing mentorship, accompaniment, peer exchange, and global networking are built into the program design. This program is open to those women who have demonstrated leadership in a development sector for at least five years and are actively engaged in social and economic change in their community.
Why transformative leadership? • Transformative leaders have deeply embedded values, support collective concerns, and are capable of achieving extraordinary results. • Transformative leadership changes formal and informal arenas, including families, communities, organizations, institutions, and systems. • Transformative leaders find creative ways to challenge patriarchal systems, confront marginalization and unequal power relations, and sidestep barriers. Feminist transformative leadership enhances the capacity of individuals to share these values, principles, power, and responsibilities as well as the benefits of changes to others. Transformative practices are crucial to shifting and sharing the power dynamics that are existing in present patriarchal cultures, practices, and systems around the world.
Transformative leadership learning In the GCL program, learning focuses on:
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Personal development, as illustrated in four components of the feminist leadership diamond. These include deepened understanding of self, purpose and politics, changes in practices and responsibilities, and awareness of principles and values1. This individual growth fosters and supports women’s capacity and commitment to social change.
SELF PERCEPTION
PRINCIPLES AND VALUES Reinforcement of ability as a change leader in order to confront and address unequal power distribution. Change leaders act in both formal and informal leadership spaces to create change, look for opportunities, and sidestep barriers. They work at the household, organizational, institutional, community, and policy levels to enable women to advance in all spheres of life. They support the capacity building of other women so that they can also fully and effectively participate as leaders and decision makers.
POLITICS AND PURPOSE PRACTICES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
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Changes to self-perception (about themselves, their body, their work and their achievements), changes to purpose and politics (positions over rights, power, and other issues which affect people and communities), practices (as a parent, child, co-worker, leader, manager, organizer, teacher, communicator), changes in responsibilities (relationship building, managing, organizing, mentoring, and networking) and changes to principles and values (belief systems and attitudes about people, culture, community, and society).
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Based on the “feminist leadership diamond” in Srilatha Batliwala (2010) ‘Feminist Leadership for Social Transformation: Clearing the Conceptual Cloud’, New Delhi: CREA. http://web.creaworld.org/ files/f1.pdf.