Innovative Leadership: Lantz McGinnis-Brown's Journey with Idaho Partners for Good
At Idaho Partners for Good one of our founding beliefs is to cultivate multi-generational and diverse leadership. Our community deserves voices that extend beyond the norm and into the innovative! We do this through many avenues including recruiting and empowering young leaders to help lead our organization, as well as those we work with. One great example is Lantz McGinnis-Brown. Lantz leads our Evaluation Team and is a Board Member. He is surrounded by elder leaders and experts on the evaluation team whom he readily learns from while also leading them.
On Monday, January 22, 2024, members of the evaluation team went to learn about the research Lantz conducted for his PhD dissertation. WOW! Not only did he do an outstanding job in the research, but he also contributed to the body of knowledge in a space we’re operating in with our grantee, Jesse Tree of Idaho. The title of his research is Narratives on Homelessness: Investigating the Connections between Language and Learning.
He was looking at the variation between how the perceptions (including biases) these nonprofits had about the homeless population they served shaped the experiences of those clients. Nonprofits with poor feedback processes, and negative conceptions of client needs and characteristics, faced difficulties in representing their clients effectively or equitably.
Few studies have explicitly looked at the connection between organizational narratives and structures. It was a comparative case study of 46 homelessness service nonprofit organizations across a clustered sample of cities similar to Boise, Idaho. The Narrative Policy Framework was used to identify key narrative areas in which organizations may vary, including prevailing descriptions of the setting/context that the organization operates within, the key characters at play, the nature of the problem being addressed, the solution for that problem, and the plot (the perceived relationship between the other elements). His study considered these elements and their impact, through feedback processes, on client representation.
The value of this research goes well beyond the homeless service organizations and into all people-serving nonprofits. How? Imagine helping an organization better understand their clients through designing feedback processes based on a learner's mindset rather than biases and false conceptions. No organization wants to admit they have a negative mindset about their clients, but it shows up pretty clearly in Lantz’s research. Let’s support more emerging leaders and put them into seats where their ideas and solutions get tested and implemented! Congratulations Dr. Lantz McGinnis-Brown!