Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW) is a nonprofit community development corporation working to transform and revitalize the physical, economic, and social landscape of Lawrence, Massachusetts. LCW’s goal is to create a new “environment of connectivity” where residents can more easily connect to information, opportunity and each other. Their belief is that if thousands of residents are induced to “get back in the game” of working together and taking leadership roles in Lawrence, they can truly revitalize the City. Leadership in a network environment is focused on being a connector not a spokesperson or even a facilitator. The more connected you are to other people, information and opportunity the more value you can extract from the environment. So in this context there is no more valuable a role than helping others to form and find those connections. Increasingly, members are trained to be “weavers” and the “weaver” is an honored and acknowledge leadership role in the network environment.

The leader has to genuinely participate in the environment in order to deploy herself appropriately. The challenges of this way of being are profound, and those challenges start with a fundamental reflection about who you are as a person and how you move through the world: how you exhibit fear, react to change, deal with letting go of power and ego. How you listen and observe and the keenness of your instincts for both conceptualizing and sythensizing. How you hold onto or let go let go of strongly held convictions about what is right and what will work. All of these things are of course rooted in the essence of who we are as people. (Bill Traynor, Vertigo and the Intentional Inhabitant, http://ourblocks.net/vertigo-and-the-intentional-inhabitant-leadership-in-a-connected-environment/)

The approach to development is to create many access points through which people in the community can enter the network. This provides opportunities for people to engage at the level they are initially comfortable and move into roles of increased responsibility within the network. In this way there are many channels for cultivating leadership capacity and always people with more experience in the group to mentor others coming in