Community leadership development.

This paper presents a model for community leadership capacity building. This model for individual and organizational development is being used with the Resource and Development Foundation (RDF) in Stellenbosch, South Africa. RDF is a non-governmental organization with the aim of providing resource-based training and capacity-building services to the socially excluded and disadvantaged youth, women and rural people of the Western Cape. Here we examine the process of capacity building, theoretically and practically, with the intention of discovering lessons to inform management education in relation to leadership and change. The paper explores the issues related to developing empowerment: the capacity of a system to engage in enterprising dialogue where power is unequally distributed. It proposes a community leadership development framework that comprises three components: leading change through dialogue, collective empowerment and connective leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]