How to get Involved with Leadership Development

Welcome to the SLPKC Blog series. My name is Avani Rana and I am the Co-Chair for the Student Leadership Knowledge Community along with Sean Ryan.  I wanted to share our new blog series this week as members of our leadership team will be sharing their experiences with you over this next year. As co-chair, one of our goals is to share a diversity of leadership learnings, and what better place to start that then with our own leadership team. Each week you will be hearing from our team about different hints, suggestions and leadership learnings. We hope you enjoy the series and we certainly welcome any topic ideas or feedback.

Joining and following the  Student Leadership Knowledge Community is a great way to connect with fellow leadership educators, individuals who are doing leadership work, and faculty. The SLPKC is an excellent resource for information. I wanted to share with you how I got involved with the Knowledge Community and share resources on how you can expand your involvement with the KC.

I did not start with the KC in leadership role,  I followed the KC through NASPA and took advantage of the many free webinars and resources.  When I started by first full time role, I started to look for syllabus ideas and also explored the National Clearinghouse for Leadership program (www.nclp.umd.org), which has a resource of online syllabi and a great publication called Concepts & Connections. I also attend the Leadership Educators Institute conference which is a bi annual leadership conference. It’s a smaller conference focused on leadership educators. This year the conference will take place in December in Orlando, Florida. You can find more information about the conference here (https://www.naspa.org/events/2018LEI). If you are interested in presenting, the program proposal deadline is June 1st. This is another great way to get to know other leadership educators and to meet some of your favorite leadership rockstars like John Dugan and Susan Komives. They are both speaking at the conference this year!

The LEI conference is a gateway to networking but also getting to know some of the members of our KC. The SLPKC is always looking for volunteers to get involved! I started my involvement by applying for a position on the leadership team for the LEI conference. I didn’t get that position but received the position as pre-conference co-chair. With that position, I had the opportunity to connect with a team of volunteers who assisted with the planning of the pre-conference and had the opportunity to work with John Dugan to present the pre-conference.  This was a great stepping stone for me as I then stepped into the role of team lead a few years later and then ran for co-chair. There are so many exciting ways to get involved in our KC; such as volunteering for a committee, a leadership team position or just volunteering at the national conference. We are always looking for opportunities to engage our members through social media, sharing their programs through our new Instagram project, or serving on the program review committee. Check out the ways to get involved through volunteer central or drop us an email at [email protected].