Leadership Toolbox: Healthy Community

Characteristic Clues to Healthy Community

While this issue focuses on the challenges rural communities face in an uncertain economy, we also must remember to celebrate the successes of our rural communities. The Heartland Center for Leadership Development has compiled a list of characteristics shared by healthy communities.

Analyzing Community Problems

In this time of economic hardship, making the best use of resources, both human and financial, is more important than ever.

Analyzing community problems helps your community group clarify the causes, consequences and nature of a problem before you try to solve it.

Leadership Toolbox: Tackling Tough Community Issues

A tough community issue is one that doesn’t yield to the usual leadership approaches and has a significant impact on the health of the community. As community leaders you have dealt with or are currently working on a tough community issue. There are three key characteristics of tough community issues:  greater complexity, longer term efforts, and higher risk. It has been said that tackling tough community issues are more about asking good questions than having the answers. Therefore, the following questions are meant to assist you in working through tough community issues.

Leadership Toolbox: Tips for living a well-balanced life

This edition of Community Leader focuses on the spiritual, recreational and artistic opportunities both as they relate to our communities and our individual lives. As the schedules of community leaders are often busy and challenging, balance can be a more difficult achievement in our personal lives. With that in mind, listed below are six tips for living a well-balanced life:

Leadership Toolbox: Identifying Community Assets

Whether you are addressing infrastructure challenges in your community or are working toward improved community health in another dimension, identifying the assets you already have in place is a vital first step in moving your community forward. The following is a list of steps used to develop an asset inventory:

Leadership Toolbox: Growing the Next Generation of Community Leaders

The following are tips alumni can utilize to grow and develop the next generation of community leaders.

Leadership Toolbox: Creating a community with more economic opportunity

The following are five tips alums can use to begin to bridge understanding about economic differences at the grassroots level.

Leadership Toolbox: Life-Long Learning

This edition of Community Leader examines the importance of lifelong learning and its role in effective community leadership. The following are five tips to help BCLP alums become more effective learners on their leadership journey: