Leadership as Community Capacity Building: A Study on the Impact of Leadership Development Training on Community

Abstract

Leadership development programs have documented positive impacts on individuals, but there is much less evidence of long-term community impacts. To explore the relationship between leadership development and community capacity, interview data from participants in a 1987 multicounty leadership program were collected and analyzed. Community impacts were assessed using Appreciative Inquiry (AI) to determine impacts on community capacity as defined by community capitals. The findings demonstrate that participants contributed greatly to specific projects from which the community benefited. The impact on capacity as measured by the changes in community capitals is not as strong, in that the participants did not explicitly link the different projects.

Keywords:

• appreciative inquiry
• capacity building
• community capitals framework
• evaluation
• leadership development