Resilient Leaders Project, a grant-funded program within The Seattle School, has named its flagship training to Certificate in Resilient Service.
The first phase of the program included a high volume of original survey and research material, including a 25-page research report. Once completed, Resilient Leaders Project expanded to provide in-person training to clergy and ministry leaders under the same name.
After the launch of the training, a desire was born to create a shareable component of the program to make the research more accessible. “As those ideas started to unfold we realized we needed to differentiate our flagship training from the other parts of the project,” says Kate Davis, Director of Resilient Leaders Project.
This led to the name Certificate in Resilient Service, a continuing education training that highlights the service aspect of ministry leaders. The training consists of three, multi-day learning modules over the course of seven months, all of which are in-person.
Resilience is not for us, it’s to give back to our community, to serve God and neighbor. The certificate is for practitioners and alumni who would like us to walk alongside them in the midst of their service.
The renaming of the training, which places a greater emphasis on service, comes at a time when our cultural climate is growing increasingly fragmented. Intersectionality enters all conversations, often to a polarizing effect. Davis sees this fragmentation not with despair, however, but with hope. “When pieces are fragmented, they’re movable. How can we resource leaders to generatively impact their communities and make our culture more livable for the future?” The desire is for ministry leaders to come through the certificate having experienced healing, and to use this healing for the transformation of their communities.
To date, the two primary functions of Resilient Leaders Project are the flagship training and creating new avenues to share the wealth of research the team has accumulated thus far, such as an online resource library.
A question the team, which includes Kate Davis and Andrea Sielaff, Researcher, often asks themselves is: “Where is resilience needed most, and can we go there?” Not in a physical sense, but in a way that makes their findings available to all. “Not everyone can come to Seattle to participate in the training, and not everyone needs to,” acknowledges Kate. She envisions the future of Resilient Leaders Project to include online trainings, weekend workshops, and a possible podcast so that ministry leaders can resource themselves, without the need to travel.
Applications for the 2020 cohort of the Certificate in Resilient Service open in February 2020. To learn more about the certificate, please visit our program page.