20 February 2011
Experiencing Transformational Leadership
Posted by Admin under: Events; Forum; Future; Inspiration; Leadership; Organization .
We had an interesting experience of the power of transformational leadership at our meeting on February 19, which brought more than 30 sustainability change leaders together to discuss the challenges we face as a species, and what we can do about it, both globally and locally.
I observed at the beginning that people had not come out just for an interesting discussion, from which they would go home to business as usual; and indeed a number of interesting and practical projects emerged from the conversation.
The agreement was that I would publish and send out a list of these projects, and the proponents will provide more details, which can then be posted and people invited to join. Here they are, in brief:
- “Our World, Our Choice” (Judith Robinson) – a project to use corporate campuses for agricultural production, especially with young “urban farmers”
- “Value Accounting” – Peter Burgess’ lifelong quest to bring the principles of accounting to the creation of actual value, and vice versa
- “Green Projects Pipeline” (Chuck Bins and Frank Wennin) – a way to coordinate, generate, and support green projects, jobs, and training, bringing together LOHAS, social enterprise, and the sustainability movement to create opportunities for all
- Accelerating the growth of the SLF through social media – May Li offered to lead a group to get us hip with Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- “Preserve Graystone” (John Huebner) – an extraordinary effort to save an extraordinary building and the open space around it.
While not presented as specific projects, there are also opportunities to participate in our initiatives in and for Haiti; in the development of the Morristown EcoCenter; and in other SBI and SLF initiatives. It’s our view that the members’ involvement in these projects will also count toward their “volunteer hours” for the SLF. We need help coordinating these initiatives, and will be looking to our volunteers for this, perhaps through an online system of some kind.
In addition, we discussed a number of other steps, including an online sign-up for membership, event notices, conference calls, volunteer time-tracking, our unique membership and microloan programs, and turning every meeting into an action-enabling event.
This doesn’t mean that we in any way glossed over the deeper issues raised by the questions and essays leading up to the discussion. One of our co-founders and board member Doug Cohen led a powerful group discussion into the issues and challenges we face, both locally and globally, and we invite those with thoughts on these topics to continue to share them as comments on the web site to this and other posts.