Institute for Community Leadership

Leadership Poetry Workshops (LPW) are a literacy-based curriculum designed to promote personal character transformation and social change. Developed over the course of twenty-eight years of community organizing and educational programming throughout the Americas, the curriculum successfully engages students in a vision setting process designed to create a photo in the mind's eye of how the world--and nation, community and school-- ought to be. Students then develop the capacity to change themselves and change others to bring about that vision.

Leadership Poetry Workshops typically consist of an eight-week workshop, presented once a week for two hours with groups of up to thirty students at a time. Each eight week Workshop has five primary components:

Vision Setting Process - ICL staff conduct a Vision Setting Process with key decision makers in the school or district before beginning any school-based project, insuring specific school-based issues, interests and desired outcomes are addressed through the leadership workshops. This process creates a Job Description for student workshop participants.
Public Speaking Events - ICL coordinates public speaking events, or Games, where students are taken out-of-school into the community where they make speeches and read their written lines at community events, chamber and business meetings, board meetings and other community venues of esteem and importance. An average of 4 games are coordinated per eight-week session.
Home Visits or Parent Interviews - ICL Coaches visit the homes of student participants, or conduct family interviews by phone. Parents are encouraged to attend public speaking events, participate in community activities and support student's changes in the home environment. This means limiting or eliminating television, monitoring homework, meeting student's teachers, and creating their own leadership vision with their child.
Leadership Poetry Workshops - The workshops are held once a week, for 90 minutes to two hour sessions, for eight weeks. While this is the preferred schedule, we do have flexibility in length and scheduling of the sessions.
Evaluation Process - All workshops are evaluated upon completion to insure project objectives have been achieved, and set course for future interactions with gradating students, or recurrent workshops. ICL offers intensive summer programming and out-of-school workshops for graduating participants.

Workshops utilize the literacy process. Students read, write and read what they have written on various social change and character transformation themes. Students develop a sense of respect for self and others, how to give and receive coaching, articulation of their life's assignments, and strength to be honest, disciplined, respectful, engaged and active participants in society. Tenets of nonviolence and the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King instill a sense of service, being other interested, one's civic responsibilities and the value of work. Students are challenged to get involved in student body life, their families and their communities. They are provided inner-realm skills and resources needed in order for one to change oneself, and change what goes on around them.

Workshop participants demonstrate increase in respect for peers and adults, increase in coaching and team building skills, improved reading, writing and listening skills and demonstrate powerful transformations in public speaking abilities. Students develop confidence in their own ideas, and the ability to listen to divergent thoughts, values and opinions. Students learn and teach concepts of nonviolence. Participants demonstrate increase in classroom participation; they represent their school and community in meaningful community roles, and demonstrate a decrease in disruptive behavior.

The Job Description created in the Vision Setting Process is critical to the workshop success. The Job Description in the administrator or program organizer's view of what role will be created for the emergent analytical and leadership skills developing in the students. Students will be eager to speak on behalf of the school, or issues of current concern, or on behalf of those who have no voice in meaningful, substantive forums.

This may include officially representing your school or community organization in public forums, school board meetings, Chamber meetings or in press conferences. It may mean going to other schools or community settings and presenting on themes of social importance such as the Annual Conference for Washington State Coalition for Homelessness or the Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity, California's Annual State-wide 4H Conference, or presenting State of Education Addresses or other elected official speeches for your state or local community.

Outcome data from workshops is compiled by ICL utilizing Survey 66, a Self esteem-assessment tool measuring seven distinct indices of alienation. Pre and post survey results are available to teachers, and provide an excellent source of information for early identification of student attitudes and beliefs toward self, peers and adults. Calibration of final workshop outcomes includes pre and post workshop information from students, teachers, parents and ICL Coaching staff.

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