The Transformative Place Leadership Framework
We worked alongside Professor Lily Song and a team of graduate students from CoDesign at the Harvard Graduate School of Design developed a new framework and comic art focused on Transformative Place Leadership. The framework meets a need in the field to provide language describing the transformative qualities of leaders doing place-based work and foregrounding issues of justice and power. It can be used for evaluating projects by those engaged in it, but also can be used as a compass or process structure by which to move through building processes.
The framework’s creation was sparked when Danya was brought on to evaluate and document the learnings from the Boston Foundation’s pilot Place Leadership Network Program. This program brought eight place-based teams together from around the Boston region to receive grant funds, attend monthly convenings curated by the Boston Foundation staff, and explore new program and project ideas. We created evaluative frameworks, observed these sessions, evaluated feedback, spoke to program advisors, and benchmarked similar programs around the country.
