At Canton for All People’s Neighborhood Leadership Academy (NLA), we believe in the power of collective action. Our program is designed to foster collaboration and capacity-building among leaders who are dedicated to addressing the projects, concerns, issues, and opportunities within our city. Through a series of immersive and experiential learning experiences, including leadership development retreats, we empower participants to make a lasting difference in their communities.
Our Academy stands out from conventional leadership programs because we recognize that true transformation occurs through communal learning. You’ll engage with like-minded individuals, forming strong networks and relationships, while gaining valuable insights and perspectives from a diverse group of leaders. This collaborative and experiential format allows you to apply your learnings directly to real-world scenarios, enhancing your ability to drive meaningful change.
The picture to the left displays our first cohort, who met as strangers and became a family. Be on the lookout for their community grant project T.O.P.I.I.C.S. (Transforming communities through Opportunities while Providing Information and Inspiration to Challenge and Support).
Below is a list of comprehensive areas discussed in the retreats:
Knowing yourself and how you lead yourself has a direct impact in every sphere of influence
that you have. This retreat focuses on learning more about our individual leadership voices and skills.
How you lead yourself and how you lead others, collaboratively, has a direct impact on how
much, how sustainable, and efficient that impact can be. What does it feel like to be on the
other side of your leadership? We will learn how our leadership styles factor into how we
relate to other in a team.
Systems dictate policies and practices that most times protect those that created them and
inherently are usually inequitable. In order to make sustainable and equitable changes we
have to understand the systems that are at play. We will learn how some of these systems
work in this retreat.
Canton as we know it today is not the Canton that has always been. Our history informs the
present. We will go to the places that have changed so much over the years and get a deeper
understanding of what happened and why happened.
We will gain a deeper understanding of local governance and how it can aid in community
challenges. We will learn about asset based community development, what makes for an
opportunity-rich community, and how to establish meaningful change by building on the assets
we already have.
We will learn about asset based community development, what makes for an opportunity-rich
community, and how to establish meaningful change by building on the assets we already
have. Teams will meet to brainstorm and begin ccommunity engagement as well as initiate
grants for those ideas.
We all have our own personal biases and experiences but we need to make sure as we develop
that we build in a way that is inclusive of all of our people in our community.We will learn
how to recognize biases that influence our efforts in making positive neighborhood change and
how to engage cultural differences with integrity and care.
The trauma that people experience from some of the conditions of our city is real and felt by so
many in our community. We will explore the different kind of communal traumas people
experience and ways that we can serve them in eliviating the things that caused them in the first
place .