A three-year effort to equip people of faith in southeast Kansas with civic leadership skills needed to lift the state’s poorest region above its tribulations kicks off Wednesday.
People of all faiths “have a God-given mandate” to serve their communities, said Sue Dodlinger, program director for Kansas Leadership Center, the Wichita-based leadership academy with faith and leadership workshops planned throughout southeast Kansas in the weeks, months and years ahead.
Using part of a $1.9 million Kansas Health Foundation grant, KLC will hold a round of workshops — scheduled Wednesday in Iola, Pittsburg, Eureka, Independence and Chanute — and not only provide civic capabilities to those involved, but also create a network in the region for faith-oriented, community-minded leaders, Dodlinger said.
Wednesday’s workshop — Iola’s is at the Creitz Recital Hall at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. — will dive into what leadership is and the hurdles communities face when cultivating the necessary leadership to improve economic and health conditions.
“We’ll start out visiting about what’s happening there in the community, what people wish would be happening in the community and how a new way of thinking about leadership might be able to close the gap,” Dodlinger said.
With “leadership” being a general term, she said participants will explore what leadership is, what being an effective leader entails and the different day-to-day experiences that make leadership a challenge.
“We’ll discuss the difference between the easy leadership actions we take and the tough ones,” Dodlinger said. “The tough ones are the leadership actions that really make a difference.”
The KLC administrator termed substantive leadership roles as “adaptive challenges,” compared to “technical challenges.”
“A technical challenge might be if you have some elderly people in the community who can’t keep their houses up. Let’s get a group of people together on Saturday and go paint and repair their homes,” she said. “But the tough one is how a community can come together to turn a dying nursing home around that they believe is important to the community,” she used as an example.
The first four-hour sessions, where food will be provided, is to be followed by three more workshops — April 24 and 25 and May 9. The April sessions will analyze each community’s needs, Dodlinger said.
“The communities will have everything to do with the direction things will go,” she said. “It’s KLC’s objective to bring some new thought processes and knowledge in but it’s entirely the communities’ prerogative what they do.”
The last faith and leadership workshop will focus on assessing existing leadership skills among those involved in the initiative using “smart experiments.”
“We’ll prompt them to think ‘what can I be trying to make some progress on some tough issue here in the community,’” she said.
KLC intends to use the final session to lay out a map for participants to continue honing their leadership skills and increasing their capabilities as a faith-oriented community leader.
“And we’ll do it all again next year,” she said, referring to the multi-year process of the initiative.
