Looking for best and better practice in the community college world? Check out the programs and institutions that are Bellwether Award finalists. The Bellwether College Consortium, through the Community College Futures Assembly, evaluates innovative and successful programs across the nation.
In 2005, the Community College of Philadelphia‘s Leadership Institute was a finalist for the Bellwether Award. The Leadership Institute was launched in 2002 and it has grown in scope and effectiveness ever since. The Leadership Institute has been endorsed throughout changes in administration at the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) over the years. It is critical to the institution’s identity, training and helping faculty and staff from across the institution. This non-credit leadership development initiative draws upon talent within the larger CCP system. It is relatively quick and economical, cohort-based, and features a project that effects a meaningful and visible improvement. CCP’s institute also aligns with, but does exactly match, the American Association of Community College’s leadership competencies for leadership.
In 2018, Susan J. Tobia, former Assistant VP for Academic Affairs at CCP, and Judith L. Gay, VP for Strategic Initiatives and Chief of Staff at CCP, decided to share all that they could about the program in a most practical book, Up and Running: Starting and Growing a Leadership Program at a Community College. It is a slim volume, easily read and digested, focused exclusively on answering “how” questions. The authors explain how to start a leadership program like CCP’s, how to recruit students and staff, how much it might cost, how to manage it, and how to evaluate it. The level of detail will appeal to the most hands-on of administrators. The authors even include sample correspondence.
What the book does do is help an institution decide why to start a leadership program. All institutions of higher education are hungry for competent and passionate leadership. My experience in higher education leads me to believe that the journey for a college or system to decide that a leadership program is needed, that the institution should own it (and not outsource the responsibility to another organization), is an extremely critical step. Knowing why – and planning for outcomes – will forecast the eventual success or failure of the program. Like many activities in higher education, there are multiple paths to achieving good ends. Figuring out which good ends to pursue – what sort of leadership and why – is the challenge.
David Potash