Throughout your Leadership in Action summer, you will both contribute to and learn from the communities you're engaging. You will face challenges that push you outside your comfort zone. You will experience highs and lows, failures and successes, and ideally walk away from the experience with a deeper understanding of social change work.  At the conclusion of your project, you should upload either a 3-5 min leadership experience video or a 500-900 word blog post with a summary description of the project goal, objectives, and outcomes to the LSN. Your video or blog post should include a description of the project, the stakeholders, the experience, the leadership learnings, the impact, and how it will be sustained.  To support your learning, we encourage you to reflect on the following guided prompts and share your responses/engage with other Scholars' responses throughout your Leadership in Action summer:  Week 1: As you embark on your LiA project, you may be experiencing change that feels welcome as well as change that feels disempowering or destabilizing. How are you being pushed outside of your comfort zone? What habits, assumptions, or beliefs do you feel like you’re being challenged to unlearn? If your project this summer builds on your research from last summer, how has last summer’s project influenced your project this year? If your LiA project is different from your research, what tools have you developed to help you work on this project?  Week 2: What kinds of conversations are you having with community members? What are you learning from your interactions? What common ground have you found with the people around you? Describe one interaction you’ve had so far that has been meaningful to you. Week 3: By this point in the summer you’ve probably settled into a routine. What does a typical day look like for you? Upload a photo or video and tell us about your day.  Week 4: What challenges and/or difficulties have you encountered so far, and how have you gone about resolving them? Speak to a specific problem you’ve encountered and how you went about trying to solve it. What did you learn from the experience? Week 5: What new skills and/or knowledge have you gained from your summer experience? Have you met anyone who has been instrumental in shaping/helping you conduct your project? Briefly, how has this person impacted you? What have you learned about leadership from this individual, and how might it influence your actions, work, and self in the future? Week 6: For your final post, upload a video presentation or create a written or photographic narrative in which you discuss your project. Why did you choose this project? What was the goal of the project? What was its significance or impact (real or potential?) How did the project evolve or change over the course of the past six weeks? Finally, please consider how your understanding of leadership (curiosity, empathy, teamwork, resilience, etc.) has informed your work or been deepened by your work. Things to consider if you’re posting a video: Describe your project in a way that is accessible to viewers who are not experts in your field and who may not be familiar with your project. Don’t speak too quickly. Try to record in a quiet space with minimal background noise. Practice your speech a few times before recording, and keep it short—your video should be between 3-5 minutes in length.

Pre-Work: Take the Clifton Strengths Assessment to identify your top five strengths. Then, read more about each of your top strengths here.Then, write a 1-2 paragraph response to this thread reflecting on the following questions: 1. What are your top five strengths, according to the assessment? 2. Were you surprised by any of your signature themes? Which of your signature themes resonate most with you?3. What did you learn about yourself from this assessment? 4. What value do you think self-understanding brings to leadership development?