Many institutes of higher education want to be known for training future community leaders, and Dominican University in River Forest is no different.
But while a future leadership program at a university might conjure up images of idealistic, wide-eyed twenty-somethings, many of the students already have years, if not decades, of experience.
“Most of the participants are in their 30s and 40s, but some are significantly older,” said Arvid Johnson, dean of the Brennan School of Business. “What we are talking about is the next generation of leaders; it is not an age description.”
Dominican is in the midst of its first full Community Leadership Program, designed to bring together younger representatives of government, non-profits and businesses and train them in future leadership skills. The university held it as a pilot program last year and expanded it this year.
The program is a joint venture of the university’s Brennan School of Business and CommunityWorks, a grant and collaboration initiative by Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation.
Henry Kranz, marketing director of the OPRF Community Foundation, said the Oak Park and River Forest area has a large number of potential leadership positions through its various organizations that training people is a necessity.
“Oak Park has so many not-for-profits that have boards, but there are a limited amount of people,” he said.
There are also issues where those in current leadership roles are nearing the end of their careers, and those in their 30s and 40s will need to step up soon.
“You are going to have a lot of senior leaders in business and organizations that will have succession issues,” Johnson said.
Those involved will meet with current leaders in government, business and non-profits to learn about current problems facing the community. The group has met once so far and will continue through June, figuring out which problems need to be addressed and coming up with a collaborative solution.
There are 15 participants this year from a variety of fields, such as municipal government, education, medicine and non-profit outreach. K.C. Poulos, sustainability manager for the Village of Oak Park and one of the participants, said they haven’t settled on a specific problem or goal quite yet, but have looked into public health and sustainability issues.
But so far, she is impressed with the diversity and experience of the participants.
“I think it’s a really talented group they put together,” she said.
Johnson said the most important aspect of the training is “trans-organizational prospective,” which simply means to look for solutions outside of their own field or expertise. They want to have the participants learn to address problems from multiple angles, instead of someone with government experience only looking at government-based solutions, or someone with an MBA only developing answers from a business prospective.
“We don’t want them to view problems strictly from that field, but take a larger community prospective” Johnson said.
