Building a Learning Community

“The Learning Community develops personal and community capacity to create the kind of community we want to live in with all its complex issues using a creative rather than reactive orientation,” says Kathy Bryon, executive director, Gordon Elwood Foundation and co-convener of the learning community.  “We wanted to bring that learning to all sectors of our community.”

In 2001, thanks to an idea from Kathy Bryon, United Way in partnership with the Gordon Elwood Foundation brought leaders together to contemplate a learning community based on Peter Senge’s work on learning organizations.  Peter Senge, Ph.D. is the author of the widely acclaimed book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.  In 2004, after extensive planning with for-profit and not for profit leaders the learning community was launched.  Beth Jandernoa and Rick Karash, colleagues of Senge’s, designed the Building a Learning Community course specifically for our community. Beth, a resident of Ashland, and Rick, from Boston, facilitated the course.

It was held over a five-day period in January and April and drew 140 participants from business, nonprofits, government, faith communities and education, including 20 high school students. Peter Senge joined the training for a day during the January session.

The learning community has offered continuing trainings once or twice a year in each of the five disciplines of systems thinking, mental models, personal mastery, shared visioning and team learning.

There have been so many successful community ventures using these skills including the Jackson County Meth Task Force, Community Poverty Summit, the Hispanic Academic Outreach, Chronic Care Self Management, Healthy Aging television show and more.

“Sometimes you have to make the choice between a food box and investing in community capacity and sometimes you get to do both,” says Dee Anne.  “It could not have been a more worthwhile endeavor.”