Lifting barriers: Leadership, tactical, and strategic issues from, and for, indigenous community development

Abstract

This paper uses learnings from a project with indigenous youth to engage with a recurring challenge in indigenous community organisation (ICO) development initiatives: The unwitting detraction from outcome efficacy by charismatic and influential indigenous leadership leading with an out-of-date repertoire. Using material from recent literature in the fields of non-profit management, new leadership, and social enterprise, the paper suggests guides to improved practice for meeting this challenge. It also sets out to effectiveness, will better underwrite sensitivity in entrepreneurial environments with complex cultural and social beliefs and practices. Such a repertoire will energise intraorganisational communal and consensual processes, which would resonate culturally with the ICO's normative behaviours and values, and would thus help the organisation marshall its collective will to frame futures that best capture their stakeholders' hopes and aspirations. Finally, it recommends that future research examine interfaces between these fields and the spiritual frameworks of indigenous world-views.