Leadership is learned in a classroom. But it is developed through practice.
That’s the idea behind Roaring Fork Leadership’s Civic Impact Projects; an essential part of the RFL Academy experience that moves leadership learning out of the classroom and into our community.
Each year, Academy participants work in teams alongside local organizations and community partners on real challenges facing the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys. The challenges aren’t hypothetical. The answers aren’t predetermined. And success isn’t measured by whether a team simply checks everything off a project plan. That’s intentional.
Why Civic Impact Projects?
Many leadership skills make sense when we’re talking about them: collaboration, communication, decision-making, navigating conflict, working across differences and leading change.
They’re much harder when you’re actually doing them. Real community challenges involve different perspectives, competing priorities, incomplete information, established systems and people who may not agree about either the problem or the solution. In other words, they’re exactly where leadership is needed.
Civic Impact Projects create a place for Academy participants to practice leadership while contributing to the community in which they live and work. Participants have an opportunity to apply what they’re learning in the Academy, including self-awareness, adaptive leadership, collaboration, decision-making and leading through complexity, while working together on something that matters beyond themselves.
Learning With Community, Not Just About Community
Civic Impact Projects are also part of RFL’s commitment to civic leadership.
Our communities are interconnected. Challenges involving housing, mental health, food access, transportation, young people, the environment or community belonging rarely fit neatly within one organization or sector. Neither do the solutions.
Through Civic Impact Projects, Academy participants build relationships with people and organizations outside their everyday circles. They listen. They ask questions. They examine assumptions. They learn to see a challenge from multiple perspectives. And community partners gain something too: a team of developing leaders bringing curiosity, capacity, connections and fresh thinking to a challenge the organization has identified as important.
It’s leadership development and community capacity-building happening at the same time.
The Goal Isn’t to “Fix” the Problem
Some problems have known solutions. Others don’t.
One of the concepts Academy participants explore is the difference between technical challenges and adaptive challenges. A technical challenge may be complicated, but expertise and an existing solution can address it. Adaptive challenges are different. Progress may require people to change behaviors, relationships, priorities, assumptions or ways of working together. There isn’t an instruction manual. Many community challenges contain both.
That’s why we don’t expect an Academy team to walk into a community organization, spend several months together and emerge having “solved” a complex issue. Instead, we ask participants to diagnose before prescribing. To listen before acting. To engage the people closest to the challenge. To experiment. To learn. And to identify meaningful ways to move the work forward. Sometimes the result is a tangible product or recommendation. Sometimes it’s a new partnership, a better understanding of the system, a pilot worth testing or a path forward that wasn’t visible before.
The work matters. So does learning how to do the work together.
Meet the Academy 2027 Civic Impact Projects
This year, four community challenges were selected to be presented to the Academy 2027 cohort.
On October 2, participants will hear directly from the project partners, explore the challenges behind each proposal and ultimately form teams around the projects they will carry forward throughout the Academy year.
1. RESPONSE: Sexual Violence Prevention
How can community leadership, awareness and collaboration strengthen sexual violence prevention in our region? This project invites Academy participants to work alongside RESPONSE to explore the systems, relationships and community conditions that contribute to prevention and where greater awareness, connection or collaboration could make a difference.
Leadership challenge: How do we engage a community around a difficult issue that cannot be addressed by one organization alone?
2. True Nature / Connection Is the Medicine: Restoration Responsibility
What does it mean to take responsibility for restoring our relationships – with ourselves, one another, our communities and the places we call home? This project invites participants to explore restoration, connection and responsibility through the work of True Nature and Connection Is the Medicine, considering how people can move from awareness toward meaningful participation and stewardship.
Leadership challenge: How do we help people see themselves as participants in a shared challenge rather than observers of it?
3. Roaring Fork Pickleball: Peace on the Courts
Pickleball may seem like an unlikely place to study leadership. That’s precisely what makes this project interesting. Rapid growth, limited shared resources, competing interests and differing perspectives about community space create a very real leadership challenge. Participants will explore how stakeholders with different needs can move beyond positions, better understand one another and develop approaches that allow shared community resources to work better for everyone.
Leadership challenge: How do we navigate conflict and competing interests when there isn’t a solution that gives everyone exactly what they want?
4. Roaring Fork Leadership: Beyond Silos
Our region has extraordinary organizations, institutions and people working every day to address community needs. But how well do we understand the system they collectively create?
Beyond Silos asks how we can better see and strengthen our regional nonprofit and civic ecosystem; understanding relationships, identifying gaps and overlaps, and finding opportunities for greater coordination and collaboration. Academy participants will help RFL explore how ecosystem mapping and network-building can help organizations move from working alongside one another toward working more effectively together.
Leadership challenge: How do we lead across organizational and sector boundaries when no single person or organization is in charge?
What Happens Next?
After hearing the four project presentations on October 2nd, Academy participants will either select one of these projects or come up with one on their own. Over the months that follow, they’ll work alongside their community partners while continuing through the RFL Academy curriculum.
That means the project itself becomes part of the classroom.
- When a team gets stuck, that’s leadership practice.
- When people disagree about the right direction, that’s leadership practice.
- When assumptions turn out to be wrong, that’s leadership practice.
When someone has to ask a better question, listen differently, engage another stakeholder, change course or help a group move forward without having all the answers; that’s leadership practice. And when people from different organizations, professions, communities and lived experiences learn how to work together on something that matters, we’re building something larger than an individual leadership skill.
We’re building the civic capacity of our region. That’s why Civic Impact Projects are such an important part of Roaring Fork Leadership. Leadership isn’t simply something we learn. It’s something we practice together.
FOLLOW THE WORK
We’ll share updates throughout the Academy year as teams dig deeper into their challenges, work alongside community partners and discover where their leadership can make a difference.
Better Leaders. Better Communities.
