Training a new kind of leader
October 14, 2011
Louise Brown
EDUCATION REPORTER
For a guy who wants to help youth on the edge, Lekan Olawoye brings the dream resumé; he grew up in social housing in the Jamestown part of Rexdale, one of Toronto’s 13 most needy neighbourhoods, and he wanted to return to his roots “to support young people who looked like me.”
He coached basketball and counselled youth, first as a volunteer, then as a front-line worker. A Bachelor of Social Work from Ryerson qualified him for more hefty programming roles.
But to actually take the reins of a community agency, Olawoye needed some business savvy, skills like budgeting and managing people and networking with the community.
Olawoye had a full-time job he didn’t want to leave, but he discovered a new free eight-month training program offered on weekends and at night by the United Way of Greater Toronto and the University of Toronto’s faculty of social work. Its goal is to groom future leaders in the non-profit sector while they hold down other jobs.
This CITY Leadership certificate (Creative Institute for Toronto’s Young Leaders) helped Olawoye land the position of executive director of the For Youth Initiative (FYI), a United Way agency that serves 400 to 500 young people each year on two bustling sites.
“It opened me up to the concept of budgets and management and networking and I used those skills right away as soon as I started the job,” said Olawoye, 26, who has been in the position three years. “I wasn’t sure what it was going to teach me but it was very practical. I had a senior mentor from Toronto Community Housing who I could have lunch with and pick his brains; it was an amazing experience.”
The United Way launched the management training program three years ago to help prepare a wave of budding leaders at community agencies to take over from a generation getting ready to retire, said Amanuel Melles, director of capacity building for the United Way of Greater Toronto.
“A lot of young people get to the sector through volunteering and we can’t expect them to go overnight to a position where they know how to supervise peers and manage and evaluate and do project management and critical thinking,” he said.
The training includes mentoring, working with peers in the field and theoretical course work, as well as organizing a community project. Olawoye helped organize a conference for 200 people on youth issues held at the U of T’s faculty of education.
“They need the tools to work with boards of directors and fundraisers and to manage employees,” said Melles about the CITY Leaders program, which has graduated 100 young people aged 19 to 29.
Olawoye now oversees two sites; one on Eglinton Avenue near Dufferin and the other on Keele Street near Weston Road. The Eglinton site serves mostly young newcomers struggling to connect with peers. It offers a homework club, leadership program, drop-in centre with computers and ping-pong tables, and cooking classes.
“You really see them blossom. When they first come they’re very quiet but after a few weeks they’re really comfortable. It fights the isolation of being at home alone. This is how young people are transformed.”
Young managers like Olawoye are a different breed of leader, said Melles. “They’re a generation with less patience for bureaucracy and they like to multi-task using social media. Is the sector ready for them? They will transform it — and we want to see a vibrant non-profit sector in Toronto.”