MISSION

The mission of The Center for Social Leadership is two-fold: To build the leadership and managerial capacity of nonprofit organizations; and to teach low-income youth the necessary career-building leadership skills to design their own exit strategies from poverty.

DEFINITION OF LEADERSHIP

After years of coaching thousands of successful non-profit executives, the primary definition of leadership CSL has arrived at is 'Leadership is the capacity to develop and sustain multiple key relationships toward a common purpose.'

An old definition of leadership is 'A leader is someone who has followers.' CSL redefines leadership with its principle that 'A leader is someone who empowers other leaders.' CSL believes a true leader is not surrounded by followers, but by other leaders.

EXPERIENTIAL METHODOLOGY

CSL's philosophy of empowerment and facilitation can be summarized by the following quote from Tony Silard, CSL's Founder and President:

"In any decision-making process, it's the person or people who participate in making the decision who gain power from the process.For participants to get anything at all out of a workshop, they have to share their own expertise, make decisions with respect to what they want to learn, and engage each other in dialogue and other interactive exercises around issues they consider to be important. This is particularly important in the case of leaders, who don't like to be led."

CSL has developed the leadership conference model using an experiential, participatory methodology. The primary goal is for the Non-Profit Directors to actively participate and share their expertise with other Directors in order to distill Best Practices in the field which they can take back to their organizations after the conference. All skills and leaderships workshops facilitated by CSL and local affiliate consultants are participatory and include a max. 33% presentation/lecture time and min. 67% time for experiential, interactive exercises including presentations, dialogue, Q&A, dramatizations, 1-on-1 interviews and group projects. In other words, if a session is 1.5 hours, at most 30 minutes of that session will be lecture and the other 1+ hour will be interactive.

1. In the United States and most Western countries, public benefit or social change organizations are referred to as non-profit organizations. In most developing countries, the more common term is non-governmental organization (NGO). CSL will use the term 'Non-Profit Organization' in this website to refer to either a non-profit organization or an NGO. For international conferences, we will use the term NGO.
2. CSL hires and trains local non-profit consultants in its experiential methodology from the city/country in which the conference is taking place to facilitate the skills workshops and conduct the follow-up Leadership Circles.