Reflecting on our 2019 annual conference

This blog is written by Dr James Rees, the former Director of the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership.

At our recent conference on 9 July, we posed three testing questions that reflected the key puzzles we’ve been grappling with in the first three years of running the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership.

These are:

What do voluntary organisations need from leadership development?
How do we better reach the small organisations that we are trying to help?
How do we contribute to making leadership more diverse?

A big part of this is that the free online courses have always been at the heart of the CVSL ‘offer’ - but we often get the sense that people in smaller organisations are not hearing about the courses or experience barriers in accessing them. This chimes with some of the findings of the recent Clore Social Leadership report.

We’re really grateful for the stimulating conversations we had on the day and the many ideas people put forward in our table session.

Somewhat to our surprise there were two key take aways that seemed to address different aspects of these questions.

Language and communication….

…is important. We know that the language of leadership development can sometimes be off-putting - it still has overtones of elitism and a potential barrier for many people in smaller organisations is that they perceive that leadership is not for them.

Therefore flexing the language in the way we talk to different constituencies is really important - many participants of our conference talked about the need to understand different ‘segments’ of the voluntary sector.

We need to find a way to make the learning offer exciting and more immediate, and a clear message was to ensure that learners feel valued - just because it’s ‘free’ we shouldn’t expect them to feel grateful!

We think the key message here is that the CVSL offer is not just for personal development, but helps concerned individuals improve practices within their organisation, sector, or local community - for the benefit of many.

In short, organisations need to be able to see themselves in communications about the courses - and this is also about diversity and inclusion!

Experimenting with ways to reach out…

A clear message for us was that we need to continued to be innovative in the way we reach out to organisations. In the early stage of CVSL, we made a lot of effort to engage with key membership bodies and ‘infrastructure’ organisations in the sector. But we acknowledge this only goes so far, and a lot of the conversation focused on the idea of creating more networked forms of communication where other actors do some of the ‘promotion’ of courses through learning communities.

The idea here revolves around the notion of supporting an abundance mentality, where we acknowledge there is plenty of stuff out there to meet different needs at different times.

For instance, consultants are important players in the ‘ecosystem’ of the voluntary sector - some people referred to them as important knowledge brokers. But they often aren’t aware that CVSL’s online courses are free to access and reuse, and that they could apply them in their own context in ways that benefit everyone. We’re always keen to hear from people who want to work with us in this way.

We also developed a facilitation pack this year with ideas for how to apply the courses locally in your own context.

Similarly, lots of people are looking for coaching, mentoring or other forms of face to face peer support. We can’t always offer this more intensive support (though we do have free courses on it!) but the free courses could easily complement this approach.

We will continue to make sure our online free courses are as accessible, relevant and useful as possible.