Leaders talked in different ways about three basic approaches for any leadership program designed to dismantle structural racism in the health system. These three approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive—we might combine scenario 2 and 3 for example, and the trade-offs among them are primarily a question of what’s most needed and the level of resources required.
- Centralized Leadership Development Approach. A leadership development program, much like RWJF’s Clinical Scholars program, in which leaders participate in intensive learning and developmental retreats. The participants apply individually or in small teams to the program, each with their own proposed initiative/intervention, and the program providers learning and support (and seed funding) that they apply to their initiative. RWJF and its implementation partner(s) would design and deliver the programs.
- Decentralized Leadership Support Approach. Organizations that are already working with groups of leaders to expand their own leadership development programs are funded to expand their work, based on the hypothesis that these groups hold the most knowledge about what’s most needed in their communities. Local organizations, being proximate to their communities and constituencies, identify and prioritize the learning and development needs of their participants and engage learning and development experts as needed to design and deliver the programs.
- Intervention-Driven Leadership Approach. Beginning with the analysis of structural intervention points, an organization or consortium of organizations would propose a collaboration to address a structural intervention point and receive an initial grant to conduct stakeholder and landscape analysis and form an initial collaboration. Based on those analyses, the organization(s) would apply for a larger grant to convene and support the group in advancing a structural change strategy. The leadership development program could be determined with/by the network participants and proposed as part of the grant for the initiative, or the group could contract with an RWJF leadership development program partner to support their leadership development.
