Tools: Capacity Building, Leadership Development, and Shared Responsibility/Accountability

"Recently, I had to do a ten-minute presentation to the United Way on allocations as well as find a volunteer to speak to the mission of the project. In the past, I would have been frazzled with sweaty palms and extremely uncomfortable. Since participating in Neighborhood Leadership Cleveland, I had a sense of what it took to do the presentation and do it well."

Maqit Sabur

The Greater Neighborhood Center Association (NCA) wanted its centers to be recognized and regularly utilized for local leadership development. Too often community organizations are not seen as places that nurture individual and community development.

NCA is an association of 26 family-focused, neighborhood-based centers and settlement houses. It seeks to reorganize and build the capacity of its member centers to ensure that each center is accessible, welcoming, and engages family members in positive activities. NCA's Family and Community Services Committee developed a strategy to include 20 neighborhoods in this organizational capacity-building process by:

• ssessing resources, capacities, and needs of the neighborhoods and the families
• establishing a network of local leaders and neighborhood residents from schools, block clubs, parent-teacher organizations, clergy, and businesses to form learning teams
• involving those learning teams in strategic planning, training, and program implementation
• experiential training to help center staff and boards
  shift their thinking to the family enabling philosophy, their new roles, organizational development, and team building
• re-structuring the center so that services, programs, and activities are asset-based

Neighborhood Leadership Cleveland is one of the programs sponsored by NCA to increase the participation and effectiveness of neighborhood residents in deciding the future of their community. The program builds upon leadership skills,

provides information about neighborhood issues and resources and helps participants establish new contacts with the community.

"In the families and neighborhood process, one can never underestimate the importance of relationship building, information sharing, consensus building and shared accountability and responsibility."

NCA Director