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ambler
11-10-2010, 02:10 PM
Last week I had the pleasure of sitting in a room with five other highly dedicated women to develop a curriculum for a USA Ultimate Women's Leadership Program.

By way of background, one of the 11 strategic priorities from the 2008-2012 Strategic Plan (http://www.usaultimate.org/about/usaultimate/strategic_planning/default.aspx) is to encourage and expand participation of women in ultimate at all levels of play. One tactic towards that strategy is to increase the number and quality of female leaders in the sport.

As a result, a Women's Leadership task force was formed to develop materials and a workshop to help women ultimate leaders. One of the first steps was to create a mission statement for our group:

To empower and motivate women in the Ultimate community to engage in leadership roles that develop and advance playing opportunities for women.

The task force had done a lot of prep work leading up to our first in-person meeting last week, developing an overview of what was envisioned for the leadership workshop. We are focusing on creating a one day workshop for women who are interested in enhancing their leadership skills to benefit the ultimate community. There are multiple modules within the workshop that could also serve as stand alone sessions, potentially paired with other ultimate events (e.g., offering one or two sections the Saturday night of an established tournament). Within each section, the curriculum will include educational components, learning activities, group discussion, and resource materials.

The main topics for which we are developing curricula include (working titles):

Being a Leader: developing and understanding your leadership style
Communication and Managing People
Group Mission and Goal Setting
Planning and Organization
Developing and Bolstering Community

We have basic outlines for these sections and are in the process of fleshing out each curriculum's details.

I thought it would be helpful for people to (a) know that this program is underway and, more importantly, (b) be able to provide input on what elements of a leadership workshop would be most helpful. We have pictured this workshop especially benefitting team captains and coaches who are just starting a team or trying to take an established team to the next level, as well as league organizers who are interested in expanding local opportunities to play for women. As we get into the nitty gritty of developing the program, hearing directly from people that it will target would be invaluable.

Please feel free to comment on this message board, e-mail me directly (mailto:gwen.ambler@usaultimate.org), or e-mail the USAU development staff (mailto:sportdevelopment@usaultimate.org) with your thoughts. Thanks!

hthorne2791
11-12-2010, 03:34 PM
I'm a guy so my opinion here may not be on target but I had a thought and wanted to share it.
I think it's somewhat incorporated into the "1. Being a Leader: developing and understanding your leadership style" but I was thinking that something that answers the question, "why bother leading?" would be useful, I mean, part of the job here is to inspire people to lead. Granted that committee you've put together could inspire anyone to do anything but still, why do you all lead? The satisfaction of making something happen in the world, right? So maybe something like "Have an impact, your leadership style." ?? Maybe women don't think of it that way and it's a guy thing, I'm really not sure :-)

ambler
11-16-2010, 01:52 PM
Henry,

Great point about inspiring people to lead. That is definitely a goal of the workshop and having concrete examples of the benefits of being a leader within the ultimate community is certainly something that should be covered. We've already brainstormed a bit about different activities during the sessions that could help motivate the attendees to go out and use their new leadership knowledge and skills.

Of course, the people that attend the workshop may have self-selected to be people that already know they want to be leaders. It will be really important to have a robust adversing/recruitment strategy to encourage women to attend the workshops even if they aren't sure about what type or how much of a leadership role they may be interested in taking on. Thoughts on the best way to get women to attend a workshop would definitely be appreciated...