VeNews June 29, 2001

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YOUNG LEADERS ONLINE

Last year, interns from Vesper Society and the World Council of Churches began a collaborative project focusing on online leadership development among young people. Based on their preliminary work, including a needs assessment, the project now enters the developmental phase.

The overall purpose is to test strategies for developing young leaders online. The project intends to develop guidelines and suggestions (a toolkit) to help young people use the Internet as a tool to form communities which are interested in collaborating from a faith and values perspective on issues such as social justice, education, the environment, or similar topics. They will then test and evaluate the toolkit. Evaluation of the project's activities will yield recommendations on how organizations might use Internet-based communities as a strategy to reach and involve young people in their activities.

A small working group of young leaders from all regions of the world will collaborate to form tools that support development of online community. The first step in the project is to create an Internet "toolkit" (methodology for group leadership online) to assist young leaders in forming and maintaining community. The young leaders will work together for two weeks creating the toolkit, which will take the form of guidelines for leading online discussions, strategies of encouraging participation, recommendations for focusing discussion, and strategies for making online decisions and monitoring their implementation.

Once the toolkit is complete, young leaders will then return to their homes where they will test it by developing online communities. Young leaders in emerging online communities have few resources to help them in their new role as leaders. The toolkit will assist them in building, leading and maintaining communities. They will try it out over a five-month period, with each person identifying an online community around issues of importance in their region. By testing the toolkit in different contexts and cultures, it should be possible to determine what works and what doesn't work in different settings.

The interns hope to be able to draw conclusions as to whether the toolkit helped in creating and supporting viable online communities. Further, it is important to understand the effectiveness of this approach in reaching young people.

Vesper Society is a private operating foundation with programs in leadership, health, and Central America. Our mission is to create opportunities for individuals, groups, and organizations to apply moral and ethical values in decision making on social and economic issues.