Kansas State University Leadership Communication doctoral student, Oluyomibo Asunlegan and faculty member Kerry Priest, Ph.D., recently received an Association of Leadership Educators (ALE) Mini-Grant Award for their project: Leadership Capacity Building Workshop for Nigerian National Youth Service Corps Members. Mini-grants provide small awards to support new initiatives aligned with the organization’s values of supportive and inclusive community, collaboration, curiosity, and rigor.
The Nigerian government’s National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) program targets young Nigerian graduates who are deployed in one-year mandatory service promoting self-reliance in the Nigerian youth.
The ALE mini-grant funded a pilot leadership training workshop to help foster purpose-driven leadership in the corps, and build the capacity for collective, sustainable change in NYSC partner communities and organizations.
Leadership Development Workshop
The workshop took place Friday, March 22, at the American Corner facility at Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria, with 26 corps members, currently carrying out their mandatory year of service, and two NYSC officials.
Over two sessions, participants engaged in dialogue and storytelling, reflecting on community issues and challenges and exploring perspectives and practices to exercise leadership for change. Topics raised included climate, education, and civic infrastructure, among many others. The wide range of issues demonstrates the complexity of challenges facing local communities.
Participants were then introduced to a process of Community Engaged Leadership as Design (CELD) (Ekwerike, 2023) in order to develop action plans and strategies for community-engaged work using design principles and adaptive leadership. This process emphasizes the importance of empathizing with people and the context and the need to engage multiple stakeholders in a process of experimentation and learning.
Ongoing assessment and follow up is planned to support corp members’ implementation and learn about their experiences.
Asunlegan, the project lead and virtual facilitator, is a first-year doctoral student and serves as a research assistant for the K-State Graduate School. Her research focuses on climate change education and advocacy. She has more than nine years of experience as a research fellow/extension personnel at the Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria, Jericho, Ibadan, Nigeria. She is also an alumna of the National Youth Service Corps.
Priest, who served as a virtual facilitator for the program, is a professor at the Staley School of Leadership and directs the Leadership Communication doctoral program. Her teaching and research agenda focuses on leadership learning and development that builds the capacity of individuals, groups, and communities to navigate complexity and engage in collective, relational, adaptive, and socially just leadership practice for systems change.
Additional program facilitators included Ifedayo Sunday Olubejide (virtual facilitator), doctoral student in Leadership Communication and graduate research assistant for the Staley School of Leadership, and Sipasi Olalekan Ayodele (in person facilitator), doctoral student and graduate research assistant in the Department of Horticulture and Nature Resources.
As a land grant institution, K-State is committed to outreach and engagement initiatives and partnerships with various stakeholders to create, share and apply knowledge into applications that address public needs. Community engagement is a major cornerstone of K-State’s Leadership Communication Ph.D. program approach to building people’s capacity to lead change.
Reference
Ekwerike, O. (2023). It takes a village: Leading social change in Africa. Masobe Books.
