On opening day of the Community Leadership Conference in 2007, Greensburg, Kansas was devastated by a tornado. On the ride back from the conference, Lisa C., (a friend of mine who happened to be from a neighboring community to Greensburg) and I crafted a plan to provide facilitated conversations to the residents of Greensburg, to help them identify both their personal needs and community preferences as they began to rebuild.Using materials from a workshop presented by the Director of Leadership Lincoln, we proposed the idea to the Kansas Community Leadership Initiative (KCLI), funded by the Kansas Health Foundation and, with their unanimous support, a group of 24 KCLI alumni facilitated over two dozen conversations with over 500 citizens on the Southern Plains of Kansas six weeks later.
Today, I and many of these same KCLI participants are wrestling with how to move our community leadership programs to a higher level of aspiration and performance...to engage our community members, in an ongoing way, in civic life, actively working to address our individual community needs.
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