This tool focuses on building leadership within a movement. Building strong leadership helps organizations survive various economic and social challenges. Leadership is essential for maintaining the focus on an organization’s central mission and also to ensure the organization is evolving alongside societal change. Strong leadership also encourages transparency, which helps build and strengthen relationships, as well as promoting trust among members. Leadership needs also evolve over time: while community-based organizations may need a leader to generate interest in a new idea or initiative, established organizations may need leadership that can fundraise to retain and cultivate a growing staff.  

Developing strong leadership within an organization includes several components, including an investment in capacity building for all members and an emphasis on inclusive approaches to leadership. Saviona Rotley notes that lack of inclusive leadership has challenged Women Waging Peace in Israel and in fact led to many women leaving the organization. In contrast, Bronagh Hinds, an activist who worked with the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA), an established organization that has played an important role in community development and social change since its founding, notes that capacity building played a key role in helping women to mobilize others and take up political positions where previous political leadership had been almost entirely male. In the context of her work, she encouraged female activists to shadow activist leaders elsewhere so as to see and imagine themselves in similar roles. She states:

I would very carefully select between 12 and 20 women…and do capacity building with them here. Then they'd go to the United States for a program for two weeks where they would be mentored by lobbyists and advocates in the States, and they would shadow Members of Congress and everything else. 

Other activists note that strong leadership requires self-care. A Black Lives Matter activist from the Southeastern United States notes the significance of a safe, protected place for healing, often in the form of a single-identity space, as part of self-care among movement leadership. More broadly, this activist discusses the importance of self-care in preventing burnout among key movement leaders, which is a danger to scaling up:

Here’s the thing, in any community, let’s just say that maybe there are 100 people that are down for a cause, maybe 5 or 10 of those people are the people that you really need to make sure that you keep healthy and fit [to] build things because it’s going to drive the movement…The leaders in the group are the ones that are effective and pushing the agenda...You gotta make sure that you attend to them.

Finally, two other activists in Northern Ireland, Andy Pollack and Eamon Rafner, highlight the importance of strong leadership for program sustainability, especially when external funding is not available or has run out. From their experience in Northern Ireland, they explain that organizations with strong leadership were able to sustain and scale up their organizations even when EU-provided peace funding was no longer available, while organizations without strong leadership were unable to do so.

Challenges you may encounter using this tool

• Community-based organizations may not have the infrastructure and capacity to use this tool effectively.

• Strong leadership is required to maintain consistent messaging; without it the core message driving social change may be lost.

• Inclusivity in leadership - a ‘leader-ful’ approach - can run either parallel to or in contradiction to this tool. Consider carefully how to promote inclusive leadership while also ensuring that leaders are strong and supported in their own right.