“Change will come regardless. You might as well
be a part of it rather than be a victim of it.”

--Joel Packham,
UI Extension,
Bear Lake County

by Marlene Fritz

Name the issue and Teton County is struggling with it, says businessman and former county commissioner Brent Robson. “We’re one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, so we have all of the issues that face a fast-growing, small, underfunded, overwhelmed county.” Topmost to Robson is the challenge of integrating the “new mindset” of newcomers with the “old mindset” of long-time residents.

“The diversity of people moving in creates a lot of issues when it comes to trusting one another, and there are many different ideas of how things are supposed to be,” agrees Ben Eborn, the Teton County UI Extension educator behind the seven-month Leadership Teton Valley (LTV) program that Robson completed last spring.

Of equal concern to Eborn is that only a relatively few residents are willing to assume decision-making roles at a time when innumerable decisions simply must be made. “In order to increase a community’s ability to get things done, you have to increase the leadership capacity of the individuals who make up the community,” he says.

Helping town leaders discover strategies to try

Between October 2005 and April 2006, Eborn watched 13 LTV participants build that leadership capacity. They spent one full day each month learning positive processes for change, developing insights on cultural and generational differences, practicing conflict-resolution skills, discussing social responsibility, exploring different leadership styles, and assessing different leadership dimensions.

In addition, they shared their impressions of the community board meetings they were required to observe and worked shoulder-to-shoulder on their group project—a career fair for Teton Valley teens.

“It doesn’t teach you everything, but it gives you good ideas on what might work best for you as a leader,” says Driggs Mayor Louis Christensen, who helped plan and participated in LTV.

Just across the border, in Teton County, Wyo., University of Wyoming extension educator and LTV program collaborator Mary Martin says she was surprised by the “incredible talent” of LTV’s community-based instructors. LTV followed the guidelines of an emerging concept called EVOLVE—Extension Volunteer Organization for Leadership Vitality & Enterprise—including drawing its instructors from the community itself and assembling a steering committee of area residents to determine its focus, schedule, and curriculum.

“Most leadership institutes have a curriculum that comes in from the outside and is imposed on a community,” says Martin. The EVOLVE workshops are different “in that we work with a cross-section of the community to discern the leadership areas the communities need to work on. We’re building resources, we’re building bridges, and we’re building bonds.”

More workshops planned

Other eastern Idaho counties are already planning their own EVOLVE-based workshops, and a mid-October western regional workshop sponsored by the two states’ extension and community development faculty has sparked even broader interest.

Bear Lake County—where UI Extension Educator Joel Packham says “it seems like we only have one person running for every office”—hopes to offer its first EVOLVE training this spring. “We need to do something to increase people’s perception of their own leadership ability,” Packham says. “Change will come regardless. You might as well be a part of it rather than be a victim of it.”

Contact Eborn at beborn@uidaho.edu, Packham at jpackham@uidaho.edu.

top