Alverno College - Community Leadership

Christina Garza-Nelson, Director, Community Leadership with students and families take to the streets with the local AFL-CIO and Voces de la Frontera to support Milwaukee’s May Day 2011 which marked another important turning point for labor. Over 25,000 people marched to a rally in Veteran’s Park on Milwaukee's lake side chanting “Si se puede!” and "Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them, we are the workers, mighty mighty workers.."

The Community Leadership degree program is designed to prepare you for community leadership, service, development, social change, organizing, and research. It enables you to act more effectively on your commitment to a better society by helping you systematically develop concrete skills for collaborating with others in organizations to achieve social change.

The program draws on interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches to managing community problems. You will learn how to assess problems, identify assets, and develop financial skills, at the level of communities and organizations. This will allow you to plan and implement proposed solutions for improving community life, and to evaluate the efficiency of the results. Courses are a combination of sociology, political science, community development, business, management, leadership, and communication. You will develop an understanding of your individual leadership style and consider the ethical implications of your work and how to integrate these with a community perspective. The result allows students to engage first-hand in the process of effective citizenship.

This program prepares students with the skills necessary for leading non-profits, organizing, program evaluation, grant writing, mobilizing, and community development.

Your capacity as a community leader will flow from your development of the ability to:

Apply theories from various social science and professional disciplines to analyze organizational effectiveness and community issues.
Conduct financial analysis and social scientific research.
Identify and compare approaches for addressing social problems drawing on diverse political and cultural perspectives.
Develop your own social philosophy.
Explore moral-ethical dimensions of community issues and apply criteria for evaluating approaches to dealing with them.
Analyze your relevant work and volunteer experience for the purpose of improving your community leadership practice.

This program is available in both the weekday and weekend college timeframes.