Supporting Feminist Transformative Leadership

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.

INDIVIDUAL CHANGE

Women’s and Men’s Consciousness INFORMAL

Women’s Access to Resources

 Cultural Norms, Values, Practices

Formal Institutions, Laws, Practices

SYSTEMIC CHANGE

How to foster transformative leadership learning A range of strategies are used by organizations and movements to recruit, train, and provide on-going support to transformative feminist leaders. Coady’s GCL program has found the following elements to be central to helping leaders reach their full potential.

Exploring ‘I’ as a leader to a transformative process. From the very start of the program, GCL inspires participants to ask questions about themselves, and about all spheres of their lives as well as their aspirations. Participants are encouraged to explore those selves with different lenses as a means of self reflection and appreciating intersectionality. Learning comes from sharing of a participant’s life stream with other women leaders, including their challenges, successes, and achievements. Participants deepen their understanding of multiple leadership models in order to appreciate their existing practice as a leader and effective ways of moving forward. They also explore historical perspectives of women’s leadership from their own contextual background as well as others around the world.

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FORMAL

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Ground learning and reflection in lived experiences.

Transformative learning recognizes that self-awareness is the key to unlocking leadership potential. Reflective spaces help people take stock of their strengths, challenge areas, their perceived agency, and other resources. This enables them to take control of their lives, set goals, and become social change agents.

Reflection and analysis- a continuous process. The class environment and discussions encourage participants to consider themselves as global citizens and global leaders. All discussions progress around local and indigenous values and knowledge about human and women’s perspectives and the influences of local and global contexts and systems. The participants get the opportunity to develop their analytical skills placing gender and feminism in the centre.

Celebrate and intentionally create diversity through peer-topeer learning. Being exposed to different cultures, personalities, fields of work, and attitudes can build acceptance of everyone’s unique contributions regardless of how different they are.

Co-creation and opportunities to learn with and from others, particularly from different backgrounds (i.e., cultural, language, socio-economics, and work) leads to deeper understanding of the issues facing women around the globe.

Adaptation from analytical framework developed by Rao and Kelleher (2005), Gender at Work.

Explore and unpack visible, hidden, and invisible power in different cultures and contexts. Intercultural learning emerged as key to fostering dialogue and perspective sharing that leads to broadened understanding of leadership, inclusion, and effective strategies to make change happen.

Invest in leadership skills. Communication, negotiation, facilitation, frameworks and theories inform practical action.

Skills such as speaking and writing are not often taught, but such investments help amplify a leader’s voice, and the voices of others to achieve larger scale change.

Exploring feminism as a pathway of rights and justice. The program uses the lenses of feminist and rights-based approaches to explore the lives of women, men, all genders, and people from diverse identities and needs. The program supports the vision of feminist transformative change where participants are equipped to challenge the practices of power and privilege.

Invest knowledge, tools, and experiential learning. While the topics in the program may vary depending on the domain of change, moving from theory to approaches and tools provide realistic means to enact change. Experiential learning activities enable leaders to learn from one another and acquire practical skills.

How to sustain the learning Put theory into practice. Coady’s experience shows that individual, community, and organizational plans help leaders put concepts and skills learned into practice. Change radiates from personal transformation to communities, organizations, and institutions.

Anticipate opportunities and backlash. Change is complex.

Plans will be adapted, changed based on realities on the ground, scaled back in the face of backlash, or scaled up as spaces for women’s empowerment open up. Advocacy and change are often incremental, and require creative thinking to sidestep barriers and confront unequal power relations.

Support intergenerational learning. While women often mentor informally, there are few formal avenues for intergenerational exchange. These rare interfaces between young leaders and established leaders ensures the continuity of women’s leadership movement worldwide.

Build a network of like-minded leaders. Support continuous knowledge sharing, emotional and professional support, and circulation of knowledge amongst networks of leaders. This boosts innovation and creativity amongst change leaders. Virtual or face-to-face spaces enable leaders to share effective strategies in promoting change in their organizations, communities, and societies.

Encourage abundant global leadership. GCL opens the opportunity of abundant leadership by providing diverse global network linkages, organizations, and programs for the alumni. The mentorship and accompaniment provided ensure access to other diverse women leaders who are well established in their fields and connected to other global arenas for engagement beyond geographic boundaries.

Take up roles as feminist leaders. Alumna take the roles of further mentoring GCL graduates, engage in the facilitation of women’s leadership programs, and co-create knowledge with a role of a fellow. These help to examine and refresh the knowledge and practices to push the agenda of feminist transformative leadership.

Enhancing local and global women’s movement. The program encourages alumni to constructively contribute to the global women’s movement agenda.

Who to target The GCL program aims to reach those women who are not yet fully established leaders, but have demonstrated potential in their line of work.

The program prioritizes women who haven’t taken other programs or had the opporunity for global exposure. The program works with leaders who are working at the grassroots level, often tackling the needs and opportunities for marginalized groups.

At the same time, established women leaders may not have had the opportunity to pause, reflect, and benefit from transformative experiences. They bring a wealth of experience and are powerful change leaders within their organizations, institutions, and networks. Programming focused on transformative leadership can create this space and build potential for longer-term support from like-minded women.

Recommendations 1. Promote change leaders through skill building, awareness training, networking, supporting collective action, providing space for peer sharing, and linking women to additional opportunities.

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2. Define and simplify what a feminist approach can mean for development practitioners in multiple contexts.

3. Acknowledge that leadership development does not take place in one transformative moment of going from “non-leader” to “leader.” Transformative leadership development is a life-long process that requires extended support for different junctures of leadership journeys. Programming especially needs to extend beyond the length of any activity as people integrate concepts and theories, practice new skills, apply their learnings, and face challenges and opportunities in their own contexts.

4. Dedicated support to enhance the leadership capacity of women working in women’s rights organizations and non-profit sector in general will ensure the sustainability of such organizations and a multi-generational commitment to the global women’s movement.

5. Women’s rights organizations need long-term, unrestricted funding to support their work in general and especially in promoting transformative women’s leadership at the local community level. Strengthening local contributions to the global women’s rights movement needs to be a primary objective, and goes hand-in-hand with recognizing that a sophisticated ecosystem of women’s rights organizations exists at all levels. Any initiatives must support developing country organizations (particularly local organizations who lack consistent funding) and efforts to build collaboration.

Acknowledgments We gratefully acknowledge the GCL alumna, mentors, associates, and current and former Coady staff who took the time to participate in graduate surveys, the tracer survey, focus groups, and interviews.

We also wish to acknowledge our Coady Institute collaborators, who provided key insight and feedback.

This study was made possible with the support of Global Affairs Canada and individual sponsors of Coady Institute’s work on women’s leadership.

CONNECT

LOCAL AND GLOBAL WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT

ACTION PLANS AND MENTORSHIP