LEAP to Offer Students Training
In Leadership, Organizing Skills

On Monday, Jan. 29, The College's Civic Engagement Office (CEO) will introduce an initiative designed to encourage the development of leadership among Bryn Mawr students. With grant support from the Surdna Foundation, the Leadership Empowerment and Advancement Program, or LEAP, aims to develop and foster leadership skills in students at Bryn Mawr, integrate the leadership development efforts by different departments on campus, and identify core competencies in the field of leadership that will guide future training initiatives. Among the topics to be addressed:

• Group facilitation
• Public presentation
• Project management
• Fundraising
• Budgeting
• Succession planning
• Community organizing

The CEO developed LEAP in conjunction with the Department of Athletics and Physical Education, the Career Development Office, the Undergraduate Dean's Office, the Office of Intercultural Affairs, Residential Life and Student Activities. The initiative "builds on the success of a leadership retreat sponsored by the Undergraduate Dean's Office last summer," says Ellie Esmond, the CEO's training coordinator and acting co-director. "We'll be offering new leadership-development programming, but we also hope to educate students about existing resources and make them more easily accessible. One of our goals is to consolidate our training efforts and offer consistent, cohesive training to student leaders."

LEAP's first effort will be a "Training of Trainers" program, open to first-, second- and third-year students. Participants in this program will attend 13 intensive training sessions over the course of the Spring 2007 and Fall 2007 semesters; the program entails a commitment to helping facilitate leadership-development seminars in either the summer or fall of 2007.

"Training the Trainers" will be led by Margie Dubrow of Creative Management Strategies, Inc., a firm that specializes in community planning and building the institutional capacity of nonprofit organizations. Dubrow led a popular and successful grantwriting workshop for students last fall.

"We'll deal with a variety of topics," Esmond explains. "Students will explore their own leadership styles, look at different models of leadership, explore ways personality affects leadership style, learn strategies for managing conflict, and get training in some important nuts-and-bolts skills like budgeting and fundraising. Because a student community necessarily experiences frequent turnovers in leadership, one of the most common problems facing student leaders is a lack of continuity, so we'll devote a session to passing the torch and another to moving into a leadership role," she says.

But LEAP's benefits will extend far beyond the Bryn Mawr campus, Esmond says. "We hope that these workshops will appeal to students in their capacity as students and as campus leaders, but the skills they teach will be valuable in any number of situations, as students graduate and take on new roles as citizens, workers and activists."

LEAP will host an information session in the Quita Woodward Room in Thomas on Monday, Jan. 29, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. For more information about LEAP, see http://www.brynmawr.edu/leap/. Applications for the Training of Trainers Program are due in the CEO by 5 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 2.

<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 1/25/2007

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