Committee Spotlight Leadership Institute

Hannah Overton

Curious to know how Junior League of Washington (JLW) committee chairs and council directors stay updated on the latest techniques and best practices for being a successful leader? Look no further than JLW’s own Leadership Institute Committee!

The Leadership Institute plans and facilitates many of JLW’s training events and offerings to ensure members have the resources they need to be successful in their placements and beyond. The committee achieves its mission of fostering development of leadership skills among JLW members through its Get On Board program, brief training sessions known as Training 10s, specialty trainings, and more. Examples of these specialty trainings include fund leader transition training, fund development training, and parliamentary procedures training. In addition to these standard trainings the committee organizes each year, the Leadership Institute also works closely with the Membership Development Council and the JLW Board to identify and plan ad hoc trainings on new topics throughout the year.

Leadership Institute worked with committees across the League to ensure JLW leadership had access to the resources and trainings they needed to be successful and support JLW members in an unprecedented year. For example, Leadership Institute collaborated and worked with the Membership Development Council leadership to ensure information on virtual capabilities to host meetings and trainings were easily available to JLW leadership. With the impact of COVID-19 and the inability to host trainings in-person, the Leadership Institute has had to transition to fully virtual sessions. According to Leadership Institute Chair Betsy Bennett, because of the virtual delivery format, the “Leadership Institute has more than doubled the trainings we provided last year.”