Leadership for All Ages
Leadership for All Ages Training of Trainers
The Intergenerational Center provides a 1-2 day training of trainers for facilitators who are planning on using the curriculum. This training can be adapted to the needs of your organization and can be paired with on-going technical assistance as needed.
Leadership for All Ages Curriculum
The Leadership for All Ages curriculum, designed by The Intergenerational Center at Temple University, supports leveraging the rich resources and assets that residents at all stages of life bring to community change efforts, and emphasizes the key strategies of the Communities for All Ages National Network:
- Developing alliances across diverse organizations and systems
- Engaging community residents of all ages in leadership roles
- Creating places, practices, and policies that promote interaction across ages
- Expanding on opportunities and supports to meet needs across the life span
The curriculum creates a range of opportunities for residents of different generations to learn together and deepen their skills as leaders and network-builders. In doing so, it seeks to counter age-segregated approaches to community building by promoting interdependence across generations and a life span approach to community change.
Training sessions include: building relationships across age and other differences; developing a community vision for all ages; decision making and problem solving strategies for multi-age groups and teams; building social capital and social networks; active listening/ community outreach strategies for multiple generations; Managing conflicts (with an emphasis on intergenerational conflict management); advocacy through storytelling; and linking training to intergenerational civic engagement.
Key learning principles:
Work from real-life experiences:
This curriculum is designed for participants to apply their learning directly to their everyday lives. For this reason, several modules are followed by an experiential session “in the field” in which participants are able to practice the skills they are learning in a real-life context.
During the regular sessions, a key role for the facilitator is to take the skills and subject matter in each module and help bring them to life for the participants. Facilitators can feel free to substitute local community issues for examples provided in the modules.
Encourage intergenerational interaction:
A key organizing principle of this training is to strengthen the leadership capacity of all age groups, deepen opportunities for intergenerational interaction,and explore howthe skills covered in each module impact people at different phases of life. We encourage the facilitator to intentionally create opportunities for participants of different ages to share perspectives and problem-solve together as they learn new skills.
Reflect and evaluate:
There is a lot of opportunity for reflection built into the curriculum. We encourage the facilitator to have the group evaluate and reflect on their experiences throughout each session. The facilitators can use this information to modify workshops as needed.
