What is your networking style?

Ie. What are your strengths in networking? Are you easily able to make initial contacts? Are you particulary good at maintaining those contacts through email, or phone calls?

Please share one challenging experience with a past or current boss, and specifically address how/if you overcame this challenge.

If you do not wish to share on this public site, please email me at ajay@pfaw.org and I will email it to the group.

Thanks!

The current Leadership Academy class is beginning their Group Coaching Calls on the topic of Professional Etiquette! Specifically, we will be discussing how to navigate organizational culture, and identifying one’s desired impacts for their organization or workplace.

Reflecting on their first retreat, which concluded August 7, Leadership Academy fellows were asked to use one word to describe their experience. The carefully selected words told us a story of a retreat that was incredibly rewarding while also being challenging and intense.

Oh, you have a new job? That's awesome! What do you do?

I've been hearing this question a lot lately from important people in my life - my friends, my family, my girlfriend's parents... And when I first started, I would generally mumble something about empowering young leaders in the progressive movement. True, but pretty vague.

Hello Fellows! Hello world!

This is a blog entry about your life. Let me explain:

I just started working in the Education and Leadership Department at YP4, and I am still trying to wrap my mind around the potential for connections with the amazing people and programs here. I am hoping to use this space to pass along what I'm learning about how all of the elements at YP4 are interconnected, and can help us in our goal of sustaining and supporting ourselves and one another.

Hey everyone, it's your friendly new Leadership Associate here!

Just wanted to let everybody know that the photos taken at the first retreat for the 2009 Leadership Academy Fellows are up in an album on Facebook.

Check 'em out!

(There's an example. Go see more! Leave comments! Get excited about our beautiful faces!)

I had a great time getting to know all of the fellows, and I'm really looking forward to keeping in touch with everyone. Here's to the next 10 months!

Travel can be a major pain, heavy bags, long lines, lost luggage, delayed flights, trains, planes, buses and cars. For frequent travelers it seems counterintuitive to continually plan trips – often many hours or days long – knowing it’s going to be uncomfortable, annoying, challenging and tiring….why willing go through that? For many of you reading this the answer is probably obvious…the bottom line is we want to get to where we are going. Whether we’re going to see family, friends, on vacation or just heading home, however difficult the journey, it’s the destination that drives us.

After a 6 hour flight from San Francisco to New York, two train rides, and 45 minutes in a van, my fellow Leadership Academy participants and I arrived to our retreat center in West Cornwall, CT. To be honest, I wasn't sure what to expect from both the location and most especially, the participants. Prior to the Academy, I had no idea West Cornwall even existed, but now, am SO thrilled our first retreat took place here-- I'll explain later. But, what about the other participants? I read their bios prior to our first retreat and was honored to be part of a "Superstar" team, but to what extent would I be able to relate to them?

So, I was going to wait until the end of the day to put up another blog about the Leadership Academy retreat in Connecticut. But this conversation is too interesting to me not to document and post right away: Fellows are debating Young People For's place on the ideology spectrum. The spectrum, most simplistically interpreted, is plotted this way (Left to Right): Radical, Systemic, Liberal, Neo Liberal, Conservative, Far Right.