What is the CLAE Leadership Institute?
CLAE’s Leadership Institute is a transformative, yearlong endeavor designed to teach emerging legal aid leaders a comprehensive set of skills and concepts essential to the exercise of leadership in a social justice context, whether in an advocacy or administrative/managerial capacity. Leaders in training (we call them fellows) learn these skills and concepts at four multi-day onsite retreats and through web-based distance learning activities between retreats. They work in pairs with hand-picked mentors from outside their programs who enrich their learning environment and provide ongoing support and encouragement. Through work on Leadership Initiatives - major projects designed to solve significant problems in their client communities or address important needs within their programs - the Fellows have the opportunity to practice the skills they’ve learned in a real world laboratory with support from their peers, their programs, their mentors and CLAE faculty.
Through a set of reflective exercises, the development of personal leadership development plans, and 360 feedback from workmates and personal acquaintances, fellows learn about themselves and explore their leadership strengths and weaknesses as perceived by others. The product of the Institute is a more mature leader, with increased self-confidence, a broad range of new analytical and practical skills, a fuller understanding of leadership in all its dimensions, and major practical experience conceiving and carrying out a complex initiative.
Click on the links below or to the left to learn about the specifics of the Institute - the curriculum, the activities fellows engage in, and our vision of leadership as a teachable set of competencies framed around our community’s core equal justice values. In a community like ours, facing major leadership changes in the coming years (as our first generation leaders - both in management and advocacy - reach retirement age and move on) nothing could be more timely than a focused, proactive approach to the development of a core group of talented and diverse new leaders ready to propel our community forward.
Leadership_Institute_-_Ready_to_Print_Guide.pdf