Three Views on Leadership

The Wallace Foundation recently published a series of papers from nationally-recognized experts on the afterschool and out-of-school time fields--Strengthening Out-of-School Time Organizations: Three Views. The papers explore key organizational, administrative, and managerial obstacles facing OST programs today, and offer several potential solutions to address these obstacles. While each paper has its own focus, one organizational capacity is prominent whether we are talking organizational management, quality improvement, or system building--LEADERSHIP.

Lucy Friedman's paper, "A View from the Field: Helping Community Organizations Meet Capacity Challenges," presents the most straightforward view of leadership. Drawing on The After School Corporation's (TASC) experience, Friedman notes that well-run, effective community based organizations all have strong leaders who address problems quickly and utilize scarse resources in the most efficient way. Significantly, Friedman argues that these leaders tend to have afterschool at the center of their mission. This means that they lead from a mission-based perspective that elevates the value OST provides children and youth. These leaders are better partners, whether with schools or other community-based organizations, because they have a strong sense of purpose. Friedman argues that funders must provide additional administrative support in order for these leaders to maintain a focus on service quality.

Gil Noam, executive director of the Program for Education, Afterschool and Resiliency is even more explicit in outlining the role of leadership. For Noam, program support structures and leadership occupy one side of quality triangle model. Strong leaders, in effect, connect all the elements that are critical for quality OST programming, from activities and curriculum, to staff development and organizational management. Effective leadership is critical to sustain a level of quality programming that has been linked to positive youth outcomes. For Noam, investment in leadership development systems will leverage all other investments in quality and organizational stability.

Finally, Heather Weiss and Pricilla Little of the Harvard Family Research Project, look toward the transformative power of effective leaders in their article on "The Role of Foundations in Strengthening OST." Within the Weiss and Little model, OST nonprofits occupy a place within a larger ecological model around learning and development for children and youth. With the movement toward seamless, whole child services that blur the lines between school, OST, and community supports, OST leaders must be collaborative changemakers, building networks and connecting to a much broader range of community partners. Funders have a role to help OST leaders through network building, training, learning communities and other resources. Funders also need to use their economic and political weight to make sure OST leaders have a prominent place at the education reform table.

While Friedman and Noam both elevate the role of leader in well-functioning OST organizations, Weiss and Little take that inward view to the next level. Drawing on the book Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High Impact Nonprofits, Weiss and Little warn of the "social entrepreneurs trap." According to the authors, "This is the trap of expanding one's own program or model without leveraging expertise and other capacities to support 'field building, policy making and broader social change' in the community and country." Being a good organizational leaders is not enough. At this important point in the development of the OST sector, we need field leaders who can provide clarity, direction and a sense of purpose for our work.

Defining Leadership

BOSTnet recently convened two focus groups of both established and emerging "leaders" in youth-serving organizations in Boston. The groups were small and provided an opportunity to engage in open dialogue around leadership challenges and leadership development. The two groups were very different in their level of experience, but both groups struggled when we engaged in an exercise to define leadership.

Perhaps not surprisingly, discussions of leadership often breakdown into 1.) discussions of management skills needed to be an effective leader, and 2.) the more intangible personality characteristics seen in strong leaders. The first group includes skills such as: organizational development, strategic planning, fiscal management, board management, communication, fundraising, etc. The second group of characteristics included: reflection, engagement, values, vision, integrity, humility, trust, balance, and ego.

With a bifurcated list of defining elements on the board, the discussion shifted to the challenges these leaders face everyday in trying to build their skills as effective leader. Common challenges include: time, resources, people, trust, fear, power & influence, inflexibility, tradition vs. innovation, burn out, generational gap (lack of succession planning), diversity, compensation. I also must add one of my personal favorites of the day--an overall belief in some leaders that "I am the only one who can...."

Lacking in the discussion was a broader emphasis on leadership in the field. For most participants, leadership was a personal journey that seemed to be confined to their own relationships, their own development and the vitality of their organizations. In an age of limited resources this makes a lot of sense. Self preservation often wins the day. However, there is clearly a need for broader and more forceful leadership around issues affecting the entire OST field. This got me thinking that perhaps what is needed is not more training programs to address the skills needed by leaders to be effective managers, but more opportunities for people to be leaders. And by that, I mean more opportunities to create change. Because, ultimately, a leader must be someone who is an agent for change rather than a manager who can read a financial statement.

Leading at the Point of Service

This is an exciting time for afterschool and out-of-school time in Boston and across Massachusetts. There is a growing recognition of the role OST plays in supporting and developing children and youth and providing the necessary assets for success in education and in life. The state’s recently convened Special Commission on After School and Out-of-School Time elevated the field, resulting in significant new funding across the state. There is an increasing emphasis on early care and school age quality, support for children and youth with special needs, and services for older youth, from career and college preparation to violence prevention. Increasingly, these programs are finding common ground in a youth development framework that transcends early care, school age, and older youth programs. Moreover, there is a growing awareness of and emphasis on coordinating services to more children in cities such as Boston. There is no longer a question of whether OST programs are necessary; instead, the question has shifted to how do we best develop and support high-quality programs and maintain a diversity of opportunities that serve the multiple needs and interests of children, youth and families.

Despite the positive signs, challenges continue to exist. As a recent report from the Wallace Foundation notes, “defining what a well-functioning, coordinated OST “system” consists of – and how to plan, operate and sustain it – remains very much an early work in progress.” Although there is strong research that tells us what elements are important for a quality program, defining what a quality program looks like and developing an infrastructure to build and support quality programming remains elusive. There is also continued debate on how best to evaluate programs. While youth outcomes remain the standard benchmark for state, federal and private funders, many researchers and advocates in the field are pushing for more quality-based indicators. The thought is that if we evaluate programs on their ability to deliver quality at the point-of-service, we can stop holding them accountable for outcomes that are out of their control. By focusing on quality, we have greater control over the levers of change, including leadership development, staff practices, program culture (risk and innovation) and workforce training systems.

There is also a lack of consensus about what are appropriate expectations for OST. When parents view afterschool as childcare they often utilize it inconsistently in response to periodic need. Moreover, reducing the basic function of afterschool to childcare excludes the role these programs play in healthy youth development. Viewing afterschool as an extension of the school day also limits the potential of the field. Focusing on academic achievement and structuring content in a school-like way can overshadows the unique characteristics of afterschool that make it a valuable learning environment. Regardless of the content a program offers, it will not tap deeper developmental assets in youth if it does not strengthen its assets as a distinct developmental setting. It is also clear that a core asset of OST learning—fun—is often a missing ingredient not readily apparent to program staff. Fun is the foundation of sustained learning and engagement from early childhood onward. Fun is the enjoyment of socialization. Fun is the ability to play with others without the constant proctoring of time that many adults and educators seem to bring. Fun learning matters!

Ultimately, our goal is universal access to quality opportunities that build developmental assets in youth, including confidence, social-competence, positive identity, positive values and a commitment to learning and community. Research shows that children and youth who have a high level of these assets at any given time make better decision, are engaged in their communities, are more resilient, and achieve more academically. For over twenty years, BOSTnet has worked to fulfill its mission to enhance the quality and increase the capacity of the out-of-school time field. While this mission is as important to us today as it has ever been, we know that access to quality programs is not enough. As researchers are finding, positive youth outcomes are most directly related to participation in quality youth environments that are safe, supportive, interactive and engaging. Yet, we have very little data on participation rates or overall demand.

Engagement is the key because it correlates directly to consistent attendance. We often talk about this as dosage, a combination of “intensity” (the number of days and hours a child takes part in a program), and “duration” (the span of time that a child is involved in OST programming). As the recent study by Public/Private Ventures notes, short-term engagement has been shown to result in only short-term outcomes without any long-term impact on youth development. If quality and participation are the key drivers of outcomes, then we must address head on the challenge of creating programming that appeals to children and youth of various ages with diverse interests. This fact reinforces the idea that programs need to focus on what happens at the point of service. Do the programmatic elements reflect what we know about quality OST opportunities? Are children and youth engaged and attending the program on a regular basis? Are children and families returning year after year and building a sense of community and cumulative outcomes over time? Allowing program leaders to focus on these elements frees them from inherently problematic, and often demoralizing, metric-driven outcomes.

Leading Youth-Serving Organizations-New Challenges

Leaders of youth serving organizations are asked to be many things—youth development experts, educators, accountants, relationship specialists, behaviorists, staff trainers, family engagement coordinators, youth outcome evaluators, fundraisers, and board managers. The growing professionalism of the field over the past decade has pushed these tasks to ever-higher levels of skill requirements without increases in compensation to support and develop staff effectively. To be truly transformative, OST leaders need to move beyond running organizations and providing services to engage policymakers and funders in creating new roles. These roles may include developing the voice of the field to help shape the broader public debate around education, youth development and achievement; or aligning community-based assets, including schools, OST programs and health services to better address the needs of the “whole child.”

Clearly, many OST leaders already play these roles, but their ability to create a viable paradigm shift in how communities view youth development is limited. Yet, this role is critical in the current climate of education reform with so many new choices being presented to communities—Expanded Learning Time, Pilot schools, community schools, charter schools, etc. The role of OST as a partner in education, youth development and public health will continue to expand over the next 5 years and will put greater demands on programs to provide high-quality educational and enrichment services. To be successful, the OST sector will need to be more thoughtful about how it recruits, develops and nurtures leaders. These individuals will be critical in shaping the identify of the field and creating realistic expectations for OST that are driven by communities, programs and youth, rather than the larger federal or state education mandates. To move the sector forward, we need to create more opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, mentoring and collaborative education.