The Liberatory Leadership Partnership 

The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation is committed to leadership development as a strategy for achieving equity.  As such, our grantee partners are inviting us to not only support them as individual leaders but also work to create the institutional and sector-wide conditions for them to thrive and achieve - where leadership is impactful, sustainable, and even joyful. 

While the leadership field has generally come to accept equity as a central component of the work, the goal post has moved. Equity without systemic transformation is no longer sufficient to meet the current demand for a radically reimagined view of leadership. The Liberatory Leadership Partnership (LLP) believes that the current moment, informed by both the Covid-19 Pandemic and the rise in racial justice consciousness, offers the leadership field both a challenge and an opportunity for transformative change. By engaging in this work, we intend to push and encourage the broader leadership development field to center on racial justice and the intersections between leadership and racial justice. 

Process for Exploration 

The LLP hopes to build on the momentum of and learn alongside emerging leaders from Black, Indigenous, people of color, women and gender non conforming-led movement spaces where equity, liberation, and a focus on systemic transformation are core. The Partnership’s work aims to bolster these leaders through intentional capacity building to ensure long-term power as well as learn and share the ways that they are innovating around transformative leadership. Through this praxis, the leadership ecosystem has an opportunity to radically reimagine leadership and the organizational structures, frameworks, tools, capacities, and practices that scaffold the work as we support these movement leaders in their exploration.

The Partnership’s core activities to galvanize liberatory leadership development efforts include:

  • Research and Data: Studying and documenting exemplary models of liberatory leadership, including best practices, tools, frameworks, and operationalization mechanisms.

  • Assembling Learning and Training Communities: Hosting gatherings of people committed to liberation to learn from and support one another; learning from leaders about liberatory leadership experiments; the Center for Third World Organizing’s Praxis Cohort - 12 Month Fellowship for 5 Emerging groups from the Movement for Black Lives ecosystem. Support of fellows includes fiscal sponsorship, mini-grants, leadership development, organization development, fundraising support.

  • Publications: Sharing accessible and practical information designed to disseminate learnings and emerging thinking to inform multiple types of stakeholders in leadership development from developing practitioners to funders to evaluators and beyond.

  • Webinars and Convenings: Holding space for shared meaning-making of emerging liberatory leadership practices for the broader community.

Key Partners:

  • Center for Third World Organizing

  • Leadership Learning Community

  • Robert Sterling Clark Foundation

  • Social Insights 

Products

Now What?

The first three years of the Liberatory Leadership Partnership focused on defining the concept and piloting programs such as the Praxis Program to test and refine the framework in real time. The next phase of the Liberatory Leadership Partnership is focused on building sector wide infrastructure for helping leaders and organizations move from liberatory leadership theory to practice. This will include expanding the partnership beyond the current organizations, launching training institutes, and growing the Living Liberation Conference as an annual touchpoint for the ecosystem.

For more info, email Trish.