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Bush Fellows 2.0: A New Kind of Partnership

February 27, 2009—

While formulating Goals for a Decade, the Foundation was consistently clear on one point. Fellows had created so much impact, not only for themselves but also for other individuals and entire communities, that fellowships would be a key strategy in achieving the Foundation’s first goal—develop courageous leaders and engage entire communities in solving problems.

To begin to accomplish this, we’ll need to better connect with the more than 2,100 fellows, invite these powerful partners to take up our goals alongside us and then support them with better tools, new opportunities and additional skills.

Partnering in the virtual world One technique to make partnerships with fellows more dynamic will be increasing the use of Web 2.0 technologies—tools like social networking (think Facebook and LinkedIn), RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts and so on. These tools create a network of connections, where feedback fl ows in a variety of directions. Going forward, look for online “gathering places” and tools that help fellows engage the Foundation, each other, and the communities and people of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Bringing everyone to the table Bush fellows are terrific leaders and could play an important role in the “engage entire communities” portion of our goal. The range of skills, experience and ways of thinking across the three fellowship programs is broad. As one of the 400-plus fellows who attended the 2007 Bush Fellows Summit put it, “No one strand of thinking or knowledge can do it solo.”

So the issue becomes how to support fellows in this key role. Can they become more persuasive, build more effective teams or mentor emerging leaders? Can they be advocates in the larger community? Once communities (and the fellows themselves) move past their learned biases about who is and is not a leader, new opportunities emerge.

These are challenging times. Community problem-solving as practiced in the past may not work for the increasingly complex issues we face now. More than ever, we need new perspectives at the table. Communities have much to gain if Bush fellows, with their amazing diversity, bring their fresh, unique eyes to community problem-solving.

Growing a community of learners and leaders The Bush Leadership Fellows Program (BLF) will be offering its 2009 fellows a new type of support aimed at helping fellows put their new knowledge and experience to work very quickly after their fellowships end. To accomplish this, fellows will craft intentional plans to focus explicitly on developing leadership skills alongside their content expertise.

To do this the BLF Program will host facilitated convenings for its next fellowship cohort. These gathering are intended to heighten the impact of the fellowship experience by reinforcing the interconnection among community problem-solving, leadership and personal development. The BLF Program expects the convenings will help fellows coalesce into a community of learners who are available to guide one another, not just during the fellowship but hopefully beyond.

The medical and artist fellowships have held similar supportive gatherings for their respective fellows. The new component of the BLF Program is modeled loosely on the work the medical fellows program began about fi ve years ago, called Courage to Imagine. The artist program has sponsored regular gatherings of its fellows for some time, and in 2007 instituted a weekend-long orientation for new fellows.

Evolving to Fellows 2.0 Whichever strategies we pursue, our fellowship programs will evolve in 2009. They have to: The Foundation can’t achieve its huge Goals for a Decade by itself. We’ll need the horsepower of everyone—fellows, communities and citizens—to ensure that 75 percent of people in all demographic groups in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota say their community is effective at solving problems and improving their quality of life by 2018.

From Winter 2008-09 issue of Giving Strength (see the article with photos)