Harcum Community Scholars

One of life’s most important lessons is that success and happiness do not result simply from intelligence, abilities, and hard work. Of course, your efforts at school and in your job or business matter a lot. These efforts deeply affect your future. But there is something perhaps even more important to your future success and happiness — your relationship network and your ability to collaborate creatively with others. Your success within interpersonal collaborations — at home with your family, your friends and relatives, your neighbors in your community, your colleagues in your workplace. Your ability to create and follow through on these opportunities for creative collaboration will profoundly affect your success and happiness in life.

The skills required for such creative collaborations are not easy to identify and the paths to strengthen your skills and abilities in this area are not always clear and accessible. People with wisdom and substantial experience refer to these skills in many different ways. Sometimes they are called 21st Century Skills. We also call them “people skills,” or “emotional intelligence.” We might call them “teamwork” or we might understand them simply as the ability to be effective. Very often, we refer to this bundle of skills involved in creative collaboration as “leadership.”

Leadership is a very complex human activity that is a critical part of group dynamics across a broad range of settings. Leadership involves mindfulness, listening, dialogue, negotiation, conflict resolution, visioning, teamwork, systems thinking, ethical reasoning and other related abilities. When people within a group have poor leadership skills, the group often become dysfunctional, ineffective, or engaged in endless internal conflicts and infighting. Groups that lack members with strong leadership skills may encounter ongoing problems and eventually may fail or disband.

I-LEAD’s Leadership Program

I-LEAD (the Institute for Leadership Education) has twenty-five years of experience helping people to develop their leadership skills and in doing so, to transform their future. For more than fifteen years, I-LEAD has been a leading partner collaborating with Harcum College to build the Achieve College Education Movement (the ACE Network). The ACE Network is formed by all of the community-based organizations in Harcum’s Partnership Sites program.

This year in a special collaboration with Harcum’s Community Scholars program, every Harcum Community Scholar (that’s you!) has full funding (meaning no out of pocket costs) to participate in I-LEAD’s Leadership program. Should you choose to participate, this program provides you with an opportunity to build powerful leadership skills that will revolutionize and strengthen your ability to interact creatively with others. Graduates of our Leadership program have had amazing success in building businesses, serving in positions of political leadership, taking on community leadership roles and, most importantly, achieving personal happiness and success. By participating in the program, you will build lifelong friendships and build a set of specific skills that will strengthen you for the rest of your life and help you to engage, aspire to, and achieve your dreams.