22 Community Leaders Graduate from Leadership Pasadena’s Six-Month Program

Leadership Pasadena congratulated 22 graduates from its six-month Leadership Development Program on June 24. The program offers students a chance to acquire deep understanding of the community in a way that is similar to an “insider’s” perspective. 

After a having operated virtual program last year, Leadership Pasadena (LP) launched an in-person cohort of Pasadena area community members for their six-month community leadership development program in January. 

“For six months, they got together three times a month and one of the sessions is a kind of leadership concept based session. The other is a round table conversation with a lot of community people engaged. And then the third one is a field trip to somewhere within Pasadena, that’s topical to what we’re studying for that month,” Kaya Plansker, Executive Director of Leadership Pasadena, said. 

Through the program, individuals who are new to Pasadena obtain an in-depth comprehension of the community that would normally take years to acquire. Long-time residents deepen and broaden their understanding of the City and benefit from access to community leaders. Even retirees who are seeking the opportunity to re-engage in the community can quick-start their volunteer career through the organization’s Leadership Development Program, according to the program description. 

Kaya Plansker said the program has been running for about 23 years now, with cohorts ranging in size from 15 to 25. Participants are often recruited from the community, but most are volunteers who come to Leadership Pasadena wanting to learn more about how they can positively impact the community. 

“That tends to bring us a good mix of people from the city of Pasadena who are city employees, people who are working within nonprofits or organizations locally, and then just individuals who are either entrepreneurs or people who are engaged in the community or passionate volunteers,” Plansker said. 

“They all come together as a cohort for what used to be eight months but is now a six-month program. They run a parallel set of curriculum where they do personal development with leadership training, and an assessment that would be sort of executive-level coaching. And then they do a deep immersion into Pasadena and all of the different sectors and what’s happening within them.” 

During the immersion phase, participants choose their own focus and get into discussions with established community experts. 

“If we’re talking about quality of life, we might bring in, say, the health department, the faith community, people who are actively advocating for causes, and quality of life for rent control or homelessness, and things like that,” Plansker said. “We’ll come together and have conversations about what’s happening in those areas, where’s our overlap and our perspectives, and where are there opportunities to collaborate.”

In the third phase of the program, the class splits up into small groups and pick something they’re passionate about, and then work on research to find what they can put back into the community in terms of programs, or resource-wise. At the end of the six months, the participants present the results to the community during a graduation event. 

This year’s class celebrated their graduation last week at The Maxwell House. 

Over the past 23 years, some 350 participants have graduated from the Leadership Development Program, which aims to continuously cultivate awareness about Pasadena as a community and build forward-thinking leaders who embrace diverse perspectives and want to help build more equitable and resilient communities and organizations. 

“We’re not asking everybody to become an advocate, and in fact, advocacy is not something we even put in our mission,” Plansker said. “It’s just that the more you know it, the more it’s hard to not participate in conversations and in solution-finding. We’re trying to make sure that people understand that they’re all connected to one another.” 

Leadership Pasadena’s next Leadership Development Program cohort begins in January 2023. Sign-ups may start between September and November, Plansker said. 

In this program, participants go through hours of neuro-science based leadership education, including numerous professional assessments; hands-on community service projects with non-profit organizations; experiential, and on-site education about Pasadena and personal connection with community leaders. 

The program also includes small-group collaboration that exposes participants to community-impact opportunity areas such as Seniors, Youth Development, Digital Divide, and Community-Commission Engagement, according to the program description. 

“I will say it’s a time-and-place kind of program. It’s not for everyone,” she said. “It does take a lot of time commitment, and we do ask people to split time between their personal lives and their professional lives.” 

For more information about Leadership Pasadena, visit www.leadershippasadena.org.