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Citizen Leaders
An initiative started in 1996 that enables local
citizen leaders — including young people — to create innovative
community projects that make a positive difference within their neighborhood
and across the city.
Participants
Local community residents with vision and commitment who want to
unite in a project team.
How Citizen Leaders Works
Leaders of project teams learn how to understand their community’s assets,
imagine ways to improve their neighborhoods, and create innovations that meet
the needs of their communities as they perceive them. Using a community innovation guide
developed by IMAGINE CHICAGO, each leader learns in 10 bi-weekly workshops how to:
- develop their own potential for leadership
- recruit and lead a project team
- design and write a project proposal
- create the project with their team
- document, share and sustain the project
Citizen Leaders and their teams submit proposals for innovations that meet the following criteria:
require creativity and commitment
- empower community members
- by giving them responsibility for the planning, implementation and evaluation of the
- project
- make a visible difference
- contribute to a positive
- community future
- be sustained by members of
- the community
- can lead to more
- initiatives
Upon the successful completion of a proposal,
the team receives a $500 seed grant to purchase materials for their
proposed innovation.
When
Workshops are held throughout the year. Some Citizen Leaders classes
are citywide; others are neighborhood-specific.
Where
1998 Citizen Leaders programs were held citywide as well as in W.
Garfield Park (May-September) and Englewood (September-December).
Funding
The David K. Hardin Generativity Trust, the Surdna Foundation, Barney
II, and the Seabury Foundation.
Outcomes
Individual - Effective Leadership
The program develops more effective leaders by teaching a wide variety
of community capacity building skills and techniques: recruiting,
asset-based planning, organizing, building shared vision, communication
skills, budgeting, proposal writing, networking, and the development
of structures that sustain projects over time. IMAGINE CHICAGO
has trained 90 local leaders to create innovative projects that
make a difference.
Above : Dance class at 'The Miracle Center' - A Citizen Leaders
project in West Humboldt Park
Community Impact - A Community Comes Together
The skill-building has an impact not only on the individual citizen
leaders but also on the teams they are organizing. The citizen leaders
hold regular meetings with their team members in which the approaches
they are learning are incorporated into the project design. Team
members take away a sense of community vision and knowledge about
how to implement that vision. Seventy-five low-cost community projects
have been organized since the program's inception. Examples include
neighborhood arts programs, a teenage coffee-house, youth clubs,
block clubs, community gardens, etc.
In the Austin community, on the west side of Chicago, what began
with several residents participating in a Citizen Leaders training
has now expanded into a community program called "Every Block
is A Village". This project seeks to reconnect a community
under an organized structure. Sixty-six blocks are targeted for
the village, thirty-seven of which are now organized by "citizen
leaders".
Further information
on specific Citizen Leader Programs
Funding
David K. Garden Generativity Trust, Surdna Foundation, Barney II,
Seabury Foundation
Connections
Surdna Foundation: www.surdna.org
The Following Documents are Available to Download
Citizen
Leaders: Inspiring Community Innovation — a case
study of the Citizen Leaders program to be published in 1999. (MS
Word document 74.5KB)
Citizen Leaders:
A Guide to Running the Citizen Leaders Program
Sect.1;
Sect.2;
Sect.3; Sect.4;
Sect.5; Sect.6;
Sect.7; Sect.8 —
a training manual so that the Citizen Leaders program may be replicated.
The manual is in eight sections .(MS Word document 833KB)
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