Partners for Sustainable Leadership
With GE Foundation support, Partners launches Leadership training program to mentor and support social entrepreneurs to create new Partners Centers in six countries over the next three years.
The General Electric Foundation recently awarded Partners for Democratic Change a substantial three-year grant to support the new Partners for Sustainable Leadership initiative, allowing for Partners to select, train and mentor six outstanding Leadership Fellows from six countries to start their own Partners’ Centers for Change and Conflict Management over the next three years.
Over our 20-year history, Partners has witnessed the important role that leaders or "social entrepreneurs" play in skills to managing interactions between government, market and civil society actors in emerging democracies. However, our experience shows that these Leaders also need an institutional underpinning to make their work sustainable. Leadership capacity, competency, and confidence are dramatically enhanced when there is an organizational "home" within which to work, congregate talent, build a body of knowledge, and achieve sustainability. Thus, any effort to support and develop leaders needs to be coupled with support for them to build, develop and sustain an institutional base. This concept has been the foundation of Partners’ organizational philosophy and the resulting 14 local Partners’ Centers throughout the world, which demonstrate the longevity and impact of our model.
With the generous support of the GE Foundation, Partners will help each Leader conduct a country-assessment, design a business plan, create an organizational structure and board of directors and begin to offer high-quality, democracy-focused facilitation, training and consulting services. Leveraging the resources of the Partners’ network of 14 national Centers, each Leader will receive individualized mentoring and technical support from his or her peer Centers for the duration of the two-year Sustainable Leadership Fellowship. The resulting new local Partners’ Center will then become a member of Partners for Democratic Change International (PDCI), the legal association of Partners’ Centers based in Brussels, Belgium, and will continue to take part in the on-going knowledge sharing and collaboration within the Partners’ network.
Colombia, Serbia and Yemen have been chosen as the first countries to participate in Partners for Sustainable Leadership in 2008.
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