The popular e-book Transformative Leadership for Community Organizations is now available as an audiobook at https://tinyurl.com/TLCommunityaudio.
There is an interesting back story about how this audiobook came into being. In 2020 – 2021 Sharla Benjamin and other community collaborators from Boulder County, Colorado, took the courses Cultivating Transformative Leadership and Cultivating the Capabilities of Transformative Leadership offered by Wilmette Institute.
During the course, they formed a creative group to consult on how they could apply what they were learning. To date, they have studied either the adult or the youth version of the book with a number of groups:
- Latino/Latina youth studying Robotics under the auspices of the organization Casa de la Esperanza, a residential community dedicated to helping agricultural workers.
- Adult mentors of the program at Casa de la Esperanza and other local community programs.
- A team of local government colleagues at Sharla’s workplace with Boulder County Parks & Open Space
Furthermore, they bought several copies of Transformative Leadership: Developing the Hidden Dimension, Transformative Leadership for Youth, and Liderazgo Moral and donated them to the educational center at Casa de la Esperanza so that parents and other youth could have access to them.
The group was also actively participating in the regional organization Alliance for Racial Healing, where they frequently mentioned concepts from Transformative Leadership. As the next step, Sharla and her collaborators decided to study the recently-published book Transformative Leadership for Community Organizations with their race unity community group, which seeks to address ablism (discrimination in favor of those who are not disabled) as well as racism and other othering systems. To enable a group that was welcoming to their present and future members who prefer or require an audiobook, Sharla wrote and asked if it would be possible to publish the book as an audiobook.
I had formerly prepared some of the capabilities of Transformative Leadership as short audiobooks – with a length of 60 – 90 minutes. In contrast, Transformative Leadership for Community Organization has over 4 hours of content. However, I usually do whatever I can to assist others who are trying to spread Transformative Leadership, so I accepted the challenge and now, a few months later, the audiobook is available for anyone who wants to use it.
Since the book includes a number of images and diagrams, with the help of Sharla and her colleagues, we developed a companion PDF to accompany the audiobook. In addition to the images and diagrams, the PDF includes discussion questions and suggestions for simple projects that can be used when a group listens to the audiobook together. However, if someone only wants to become acquainted with the content, they can listen to the book without referring to these activities.
Now that the audiobook is published, Sharla’s group is going to proceed with the study, also inviting friends from the Colorado Center for the Blind and from a race unity book club in which members of the core group are involved.
We hope that the audiobook proves useful, not only to Sharla and her colleagues but to many of you who may find it a useful addition to the materials that you can use in sharing Transformative Leadership with others.
