The mission of The Civic Leadership Training Council, where I serve as Executive Director, is to identify, motivate and continually develop new and emerging leaders from the business, nonprofit and public sectors to affect change in the quality of civic, cultural and economic life.

At the Council, we have a responsibility to prepare our citizens for an increasingly broad array of leadership opportunities, in varying formats, in both traditional and alternative settings. We are convinced that, in order to fulfill our mission, we cannot limit ourselves to attracting the same candidates for our existing programs, but must adapt our strategies to attract, prepare and engage a wider pool of citizens for leadership and community engagement and assist other communities to do the same.

We are identifying new venues for citizen engagement, providing a platform to share, showcase promising practices and develop tailored sets of resources for each of our learning “communities”, providing quick access to up-to-date, creative and substantive training materials, surveys, effective practices and practical tools and strategies for involving media in strengthening civic engagement. These actions should provide us a firm foundation to meet our community's future leadership challenges.