London's Pilot Women's Leadership Circle: Limberlost

You must give birth to your images
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you
Long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth,
For the hour of new clarity.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

A pilot project to assess The Women's Leadership Resource Kit took place between November 2007 and March 2008 at Limberlost Community Center. We defined the intention of this group as joining with like-minded women who wanted to explore their leadership capacity and expression by following the format suggested in the Leadership Guidebook. Seven women committed to the process; three others attended as their lives allowed. The makeup of the group was multi-generational, multi-cultural, and covered a wide cross-section of socio-economic levels.

We used the Leadership Guidebook to inform the flow of each of the seven sessions and found it incredibly helpful, while also recognizing that our group, like any group, will take its own organic journey. The focus of the seven sessions is, first and foremost, on individual strengths with the challenges of our unique individual worlds serving as the context. The trust we built between us grew each session, giving individual support and empowerment for each of us to make good decisions for ourselves and "to mend that part of the world that is within our reach." At the end of the seven sessions, we shared a heartfelt recognition of how much we had each received and given in our Circle experience with one another.

Another Leadership Circle at Limberlost, with combinations of new and "seasoned" participants, is currently in the initial phase of forming. As well, new groups are forming throughout the community.