Steve mentioned the Southeast Public Health Leadership Institute in his last post, and I thought I would take this opportunity to plug this and another leadership training program (the Emerging Leaders in Public Health program), both run through the Institute. Many of our Management Academy for Public Health Alumni are leaders in their organizations, and we see them in our leadership programs as well. This is great for us (because our alumni are wonderful) and we’ve had some really positive feed back from them, so we think it’s pretty good for them as well.
The Southeast Public Health Leadership Institute is a year-long leadership development program for mid- to senior level public health administrators working in the states of Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
The Institute strengthens leadership competencies, such as creating a shared vision, personal awareness, systems thinking, risk communication, team building, ethical decision making and political and social change strategies. Each scholar also completes an individual learning plan, a community leadership project, a mentoring relationship and four small group assignments.
SEPHLI begins in December and ends the following December. Face-to-face interactions between the scholars and guest faculty occur three times during the program year: at the beginning, at mid-year (May) and at the end. Between these scheduled meetings, Institute activities take place via distance learning using a mixture of both real time and asynchronous delivery modalities. Scholar distance learning requirements include attending a minimum of four telephone conference calls and two online computer forums.
The Emerging Leaders in Public Health (ELPH) program is designed to prepare the next generation of public health leaders to serve in significant leadership capacities in the next decade. The program focuses on minority public health professionals because African Americans, Native Americans/Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders, Asian Americans, and Hispanics are under-represented in terms of public health leadership.
ELPH scholars learn through a combination of on-site intensive workshops, personalized coaching, action learning teams, and individualized leadership coaching.
Every year an extremely impressive cadre of scholars apply for and attend the programs. In both cases, scholars attend as individuals and complete individual projects. Unlike the Management Academy, their projects do not have to be for revenue generating programs, or use business planning at all – and they can be internal to their organizations. Check out the SEPHLI and ELPH websites to read some amazing stories about graduate success stories.
Applications for ELPH are being accepted now until May 31, 2009. SEPHLI applications are generally in late summer – we’ll keep you posted.