Collaborative Partners:

Sarah Congleton, UK Cooperative Extension, Montgomery County

Ron Catchen, UK Cooperative Extension, Montgomery County

Dan Kahl, UK Extension, CLD Associate Professor, CEDIK

Audriana Palmer, KSU Community Leadership Specialist

 Nicole Breazeale, UK Extension, CLD Associate Professor

The second Kentucky Leadership Summit was held at the KSU Benson Farm on May 22, 2024. Seventy participants representing leadership programs from across Kentucky participated in the summit. The planning team is committed to developing a community of practice, facilitating networking, and sharing research and evidence-based resources to community and regional leadership development programs. Our goal is to work with local leadership programs to elevate the confidence and competence of citizens to lead in their communities.  To host the event, University of Kentucky and Kentucky State University Cooperative Extension partnered with the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce Executives to invite Chamber of Commerce and Cooperative Extension community leadership program planners to this important networking event. 

The summit was organized around the wisdom of the practitioners. Key programming topics for community leadership programs were identified by participants which included program financing, participant recruitment, program scheduling, and program evaluation.  Interspersed by leadership speakers, the summit provided small group discussions on each of these topic areas. Summarized discussion notes on each of these topics were then compiled and shared with the participants.

The design of this summit was intended to respect the working knowledge of the group while also seeking areas to improve our programming options. Several indicators reflect our success.

Impact Summary:

Cooperative Extension is compiling and coordinating resources to aid in the development of stronger citizens and individuals with the confidence and competence to take action locally. Toward that end, we are creating evidence based processes to improving local leadership development by:

Creating stronger networks: A new statewide social media network was created for Community Leadership Program Coordinators currently serving 120 members.

Providing assessment services for community impact: This includes sample evaluation methods as well as support in Ripple Effect Mapping, which has been conducted through two longstanding leadership programs.

Providing assessment tools to improve program success: including a customized survey which has been used by two Extension offices in the development of their community leadership programs.

Sharing our success. Professional presentations have been given at NACDEP and the Community Development Society (CDS) on the collaborative approach to share resources.