About M-LEAD
M-LEAD is how the University of Michigan helps students grow as leaders. As a resource, M-LEAD is a “one-stop shop” for different programs, experiences, and communities across campus that can help you grow your leadership skills and impact. It’s all about helping you understand yourself, work with others, and make a positive impact.
Whether you’re joining a student organization, doing community service, or exploring your identity and values, M-LEAD brings these experiences together to help you become the kind of leader who makes real change.
Three Student Life teams help guide M-LEAD: the Center for Campus Involvement, the Ginsberg Center, and Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs. They work behind the scenes to make leadership opportunities more connected, accessible, and meaningful for all students.
Our Collective Impact Framework
Since the 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article introduced the concept, collective impact has been widely adopted as an effective form of cross-sector collaboration to address complex social and environmental challenges. “…research shows that successful collective impact initiatives typically have five conditions that together produce true alignment and lead to powerful results: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support organizations.” (Stanford Social Innovation Review, John Kania & Mark Kramer, Winter 2011). Below we have defined each of these conditions related to how we approach them.
Common Agenda
All University of Michigan students will have access to leadership education and opportunities that empower and prepare them to create positive, sustainable social change on their campus and in their community.
Backbone Support
M-LEAD is supported by an Associate Director who helps keep all the leadership programs across Student Life connected and working toward the same goals. They work with two main teams:
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The Strategic Lead Team – made up of the directors from the Center for Campus Involvement, the Ginsberg Center, and Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs.
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The Action Team – made up of staff from different Student Life departments who focus on leadership programs for students.
Together, these teams help make it easier for students to find leadership opportunities that are meaningful, skill-building, and focused on making a positive impact.
Continuous Communication
Members of the Strategic Lead Team and Action Team meet regularly with one another and share ideas, information and resources. M-LEAD communicates information about leadership offerings with students, faculty and staff. M-LEAD also works with campus partners to adjourn a meeting of leadership educators called the Michigan Leadership Collaborative.
Mutually Reinforcing Activities
M-LEAD works with departments in Student Life to ensure that leadership programs and activities reinforce one another through our CORE Competencies, assessment strategies, curricular design and implementation.
Shared Measurements
M-LEAD works with departments across the division in aligning data collection and measurement tools to ensure consistency and alignment. This includes data collected from the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership.