Leading Communications for Impact
Do you believe strongly in the role of communications in ensuring your organization’s impact?
Are you in an organization that doesn’t quite understand the importance of strategic communications?
Do you find that your colleagues have expectations of your role that do not match your own understanding of what it means to lead communications?
Do you feel increasingly frustrated or demotivated by the lack of traction that your communications efforts get within your organization?
If you are leading communications work for a human rights or social justice organization and find yourself experiencing these challenges, this program is for you.
The Leading Communications for Impact program is unique in bringing together two usually separate disciplines - organizational strengthening and strategic communications that combined create powerful possibilities for more effective leadership by you, your team and your organization.
Putting learning from experience at its heart, the program supports you to work with and learn from the real challenges and possibilities for change that exist in your organization. Based on our decades of accompaniment practice, we work with you to create a process of in-depth learning, experimentation, and reflection at a measured pace that works for each individual and the group.
As part of a global cohort of communications leaders from other human rights and social justice organizations and movements you will learn to:
- Strengthen your leadership capacity to put communications at the heart of your organization’s work
- Position yourself as a strategic partner of your colleagues to create collaboration processes that work for the whole organization.
- Manage the frustration, anxieties, conflicts and other difficulties that arise from working within complex organizational systems to lead processes of change
You’ll leave the Leading Communications for Impact program, not only with the capacity to make your communications know-how really work for your organization and increase your organization’s impact, but also with deep connections and relationships with other communications professionals across organizations, networks and movements.
How the Program Works
The Leading Communications for Impact program is entirely online so you can join from wherever you are in the world. It runs from 27 February to 27 November 2023 with a break in the middle and includes:
- bimonthly two hour interactive small group peer learning sessions with readings, engaging speakers, challenging discussions, and organizational problem solving exercises at dates and times that work for all the time zones of participants (32 hours in total)
- tasks of no more than two hours in-between each group session to put learning into practice in your organizational setting
- monthly one hour individual coaching sessions to explore your current strategic communications leadership challenges and solutions in your organizational setting
What the Program Covers
- The current global context: challenges and possibilities for social change
- The role of communications in social change
- Your organization as an internal ‘system’ and the role of communications in the system
- Under-the-surface internal organizational dynamics that impede effective decisions about communications
- Your role in leading communications in your organization
- Your leadership strengths and difficulties and what they mean for how you lead communications
- Working with your colleagues’ responses to your leadership
- Creating communications processes that work for everyone
- Your next steps as a communications leader
Program Costs
Pay it forward rate - USD $3500: for organizations with an annual budget of more than USD $5 million or individuals with annual income of over USD $85,000. Payment at this rate covers the cost of the program and makes a contribution to support the participation of individuals with less access to financial resources.
Full Cost Rate - USD $2500: for organizations with an annual budget of between USD $3 to 5 million or individuals with annual income of between USD $50,000 to 85,000.
Solidarity Rate - USD $1500: for organizations with an annual budget of less than USD $3 million or individuals with annual income of less than $50,000.
If none of these rates are affordable to you, please contact us and we can discuss what might be possible.
Program Facilitators
Barbara Williams EdD, founder of Bureau Kensington Inc. consults with international feminist movement organizations and funds in the global South and anti-poverty and racial justice organizing in the global North. She writes and has led courses in psychoanalysis and organizations at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society.
Anna Turley spent 15 years leading strategic communications for global feminist and women’s rights organizations resulting in deeper organizational reach and impact. She now consults with international feminist organizations and funders and works to support leaders to transform their organizations, including their strategic communications.
Myriam Horngren is a social change strategist using strategic communications to help organizations achieve greater impact in their chosen field. With an MA in Communications for Development from the University of Malmo in Sweden, Myriam has also lectured at Sciences Po Paris and The Catholic Institute.
Bureau Kensington is a small women-led consulting firm committed to contributing to a more just world through its work with feminist, social and climate justice organizations, networks and funds. We work at the intersection of organizational strengthening and strategic communications to provide organizational and leadership strengthening support, help address counterproductive group processes and reorient leaders and organizations for greater impact.
Anna Turley: aturley@bureaukensington.com
