Frequently Asked Questions

What is collective leadership?

Rather than residing in a single individual or formal authority, collective leadership is an outcome that emerges through dialogue, distributed expertise, mutual accountability, and collaborative action. 

Collective leadership is a practice – a shared, relational practice that values and mobilizes diverse people, perspectives, and expertise to achieve a common purpose and create positive change.

Collective leadership requires a capacity to work across differences and sectors to address complex challenges in social and organizational systems, through adaptive learning and distributed decision-making.

  • In the CLIC program, we aim to practice collective leadership as a shared responsibility to achieve positive outcomes for local communities. Our practice and the collective capacity we develop will determine what is possible, and what emerges.

A physical or virtual space where citizens, researchers, organizations, public institutions, and other stakeholders collaborate on an equal footing, to identify challenges, co-design, experiment, and evaluate solutions that address shared needs.

A participatory approach to innovation that mobilizes local resources, knowledge, and experiences to foster collective learning, social innovation, and the development of relevant, sustainable solutions that are adapted to the realities of communities.

  • In the CLIC program, we are building a living lab as a social infrastructure to support applied research into the experience of newcomers in Canada, in order to co-create more inclusive communities, through experimentation and demonstration, with partners from different sectors.

An immersion is a deep, time-bounded learning experience that prioritizes:

  • Experiential learning with application to live community and organisational challenges
  • Relational trust-building and collaboration 
  • Personalized feedback
  • In the CLIC program, the leadership immersion will  bring together a small cohort of leaders with partners from the public, private, community and academic sectors. It is planned for the last week of October 2026.

There are several ways to participate, as:

  1.  Leadership Cohort participant
  2.  Organizational partner and/or investor
  3.  Mentor

Demonstration of leadership skills – examples:
– Having rallied people toward a common goal
– Having collaborated with partners across diverse networks to implement strategies
– Having guided change to overcome obstacles or introduce new ways of doing things within an organization or community
– Having created and communicated a vision and strategy that captured the interest of an organization or community
– Having identified and managed the risks of an initiative
– Having shown resilience in the face of obstacles and unexpected challenges
This list doesn’t exclude other examples from your personal journey