DeVos Urban Leadership is a national faith-based leadership development program for urban youth workers in Christian organizations and institutions. Each year, approximately 60 urban youth workers from five select U.S. cities are accepted in the 15-month training program. Participants are challenged by an intense curriculum where they to learn to integrate "breakthrough leadership skills" into their personal life and ministry. After graduating from the program, alumni are encouraged to work toward local collaborative efforts that ultimately impact the lives of urban youth in their communities.
The training curriculum is built on five core values:
Accountability, Balance, Interdependence, Empowerment, and Leverage.
These core values encourage participants to reexamine God's calling to their work and their faithfulness to that mission. In addition to the core values, the training will intensely explore the following skills:
Increasing Awareness, Identifying Assets, Planning For Change, Problem Solving, and Mobilizing Resources.
These skills help participants manage and change how they live and work.
Effective leaders regularly seek feedback and guidance from trusted sources. Participants are encouraged to know themselves more fully through personal reflection, open sharing, and supportive accountability relationships. The writer of Hebrews captured the essence of accountability in Heb. 10:24-25 (NIV). Too often the busyness of ministry makes it difficult to maintain these critically important relationships, and we lose the benefit of both the encouragement and correction they offer.
Accountability relationships, including mentoring, coaching and peer review, are increasingly popular—and important—components of leadership development programs in business, government, non-profit organizations and ministry. Such relationships are established and nurtured throughout the Initiative through three primary means. First, the participants are members of a local learning community—a group of peers who support each other’s learning. Second, the participants meet every other month for local group dialogues, which provide opportunities for regular checkins with each other. Finally, participants meet monthly with carefully selected mentors who help them reflect on what they are learning, particularly in relation to the five core values. Through these means, and supplemented by ongoing journaling, participants learn the value of feedback from others as a rich learning resource, and identify which approaches work best for them.
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