Leadership Louisville

At the end of last week, I got to meet with Chris Johnson and Holly Prather from the Leadership Louisville Centre. Leadership Louisville aims to provide practical help and tuition to the current and next generation of Louisville's community leaders. Similar to the UK's "Common Purpose", Leadership Louisville takes new and emerging leaders from across sectors to hep them develop their leadership skills together, find their passion and develop their voice.

Leadership Louisville began back in 1979 when a group of forward thinking leaders decided to try and bottle some of what had collectively made them successful. They looked at their skill base, and the opportunities that they had been given and came up with some core competencies and a range of ideas for giving others opportunities for successful leadership development.

To date there have been over 6000 graduates of 4 different leadership programmes, which each cover slightly different aspects. The original "Leadership Louisville" programme, a nine month programme, "Ignite Louisville" a sixth month programme for up and coming leaders, "Focus Louisville" a 2.5 day programme that takes an in-depth look in how the city works from different perspectives, and the "Bingham Fellows" which sets a challenge to experienced leaders to develop innovative solutions to the community's most pressing problems.

A newer programme I was very interested in is the 100 Wise Women of Louisville, a breakfast forum for women to connect with distinguished women leaders to network for career development. Held quarterly the 2 hour breakfast costs $30, with proceeds going to provide bursaries for young women to participate in the leadership programmes. This could be a very potent formula for all kinds of focused leadership development.

What particularly struck me with the Leadership Louisville team was their shared determination at doing better for the city, at really wanting to get to grips with the issues being faced at all levels of organisation in the city, as well as their breadth and depth of connections across the city. I look forward to exploring more of those connections next week.