Opportunity

Cultivate new leadership for a healthy society

Recommendation

The nation should encourage community leadership in a “flash mob for health” that increases wellbeing, vitality and supports each person’s potential to move toward a flourishing society at all levels and in all sectors and communities.

Great leadership has a sense of purpose that generates commitments and great followership. Community leadership education and development processes can use an ecological whole person model. This form of leadership is at once personal and in concert with others who can mobilize people to rally around taking responsibility for health at both the individual and community levels. People need to learn how to self-lead as well as how to lead others in team-based learning that begins with a vision of a healthier society. Learning communities create connections that foster the capacity to listen to the perspectives of both older and younger people and to cross boundaries between fields and organizations so that health permeates all sectors.

The keys to fostering leadership for health so that the nation flourishes through community engagement include:

• Convene local leadership sessions supported by people from the military, the Peace Corps, business and recognized non-profit organizations.

• Create a cultural change leadership group dedicated to fostering the movement to bring about the profound cultural shift and vision of healthy people in healthy places. 

• Communicate the key concepts of health, wellness, salutogenesis and holism using words such as flourishing and wellbeing which people relate to easily.

• Offer leadership teachings to various audiences, including youths and elders, who can diffuse lessons through schools and community projects.

• Create a National Health Corps that includes chapters and programs for people at various stages of their careers and connects virtual as well as geographic communities.

• Use a case-based learning process that incorporates complexity theory and change management knowledge applied through teams that support community health.

• Teach communities to organize around goals and metrics; then create the conditions for the “first followers” to emerge at the local level while dismantling the old leadership paradigm and structural constraints that inhibit young leaders