2024 Brushy Fork Leadership Summit

Whether this is your first visit or you’ve been with us often during the last 20 years, we invite you to join leaders from across the region as we explore ideas for inclusive solutions to community challenges. And we continue to offer hands-on, applicable workshop tracks that will increase your skills in nonprofit and community leadership.

The 20th annual Brushy Fork Leadership Summit will explore how local leaders can support community efforts by empowering others to work for the good of the places they call home. We often hear the notion of bringing people to the table. But how can we create leadership spaces that are truly community-owned, where change is defined by the community, which then controls resources and decisions? Brushy Fork believes that leadership begins by collaboratively building this table, creating accessible seats for all community members.

Take a breath and a break from the daily grind! Come see old friends and make new ones. Share in conversations and learning that will inspire and excite you! Celebrate a vision for inclusive leadership and community development with art, music, and great local food!

Brushy Fork is excited to offer an exciting selection of high-quality workshop tracks at the 2024 Leadership Summit. The Leadership Summit features six, eight-hour workshop tracks. Participants select one track to follow throughout the Summit.

1. Should Nonprofits Start Making a Profit? How to Create Social Enterprise in Small Communities | Mae Suramek | Can your organization benefit from a social enterprise model? This leadership track will explore different organizational models that incorporate social enterprise components into existing nonprofits, or that serve as a separate entity benefitting a nonprofit organization or social mission. While social enterprises prioritize social or environmental goals over profits, they also aim to maximize financial security, and are therefore well-positioned to help diversify and increase funding streams for nonprofit organizations. Track participants will brainstorm and explore sustainable solutions to critical social problems by providing products, services and/or fair employment opportunities. Track participants will develop one-page proposals for a social enterprise concept and learn how and where to pitch their ideas.

2 . What is the Culture in Organizational Culture? | Joe Tolbert, Jr. | Is your organization's culture hindering its mission? As mission driven organizations do their work of bringing about a more equitable world, many of these organizations are experiencing the same symptoms of a capitalist culture that structures so much of our lives that leads to burning out, a lack of care, and high emphasis on productivity. This is leading many who work in non-profits and community-based organizations to desire more equitable, shared leadership models that center care for mission and those who carry it out. Liberatory organizational cultures are organizational cultures that are non-hierarchical, center everyone in the decision-making process, and that see the whole person and not just a means to produce. In this interactive workshop, participants will learn the basics of cultural organizing and how to apply its principles and values to create more liberatory cultures that get us away from organizations built on hierarchy and productivity. Through storytelling, visioning practices, and organizational assessments, participants will dream toward plans of more democratic leadership models and restorative cultures. Participants can expect to walk away with: An understanding of cultural organizing framework, how to apply the cultural organizing framework to reimagine organizational culture, fresh ideas of how their organizations can be reimagined toward non-hierarchical models, and a rough outline of what an equitable, shared leadership model could look like.

3 . Building Community Power: Practical Strategies & Tools for Stability & Growth | Chris Handberg | Is your organization stuck in the daily grind? Always meeting deadlines and managing crises at the expense of long-term planning and strategic growth? This workshop is designed to equip nonprofit leaders with the practical solutions, strategies, and tools needed for meaningful organizational development. Shift your focus back to the foundations that foster organizational health and expansion. You'll gain insights into effective program and personnel evaluation, learn to devise and implement long-term strategies, discover how to energize and engage your Board of Directors, and develop policies and procedures that are straightforward and actionable. Prepare to leave with the skills and knowledge to transform your nonprofit into a more robust and effective organization.

4 . Amplifying Impact: Strategies for Nonprofit Communications | Rachel Rosolina & Erin Rosolina | Is your nonprofit's communication strategy effectively telling your story? At its core, strong communication is storytelling. Does your organization's communications strategy successfully draw people in and build community? Join Rachel Rosolina, Communications Director at Appalshop, and Erin Rosolina, Marketing Director at the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, for a deep look into essential aspects of nonprofit communications as they combine best practices from both an arts perspective and a science education perspective. This track will include sessions on creating an overarching comms strategy, working with development to tell a powerful story for potential donors, deftly handling media relations, writing strong press releases, ensuring clear branding across all platforms, and more.

5. Personal People Ready Leadership | Dee Parker and Leah Van Winkle | Looking for ways to elevate your Personal People Ready Leadership Skills? Join Leah Van Winkle, Associate Director of Programs at Brushy Fork Leadership Institute and Social Impact Designer Dee Parker at the 2024 Annual Leadership Summit for an in-depth exploration of personal leadership development, where you’ll discover tools and strategies for self-confidence and embodied leadership while understanding your purpose, place and role in community.

6 . Narrative 4 Story Exchange: Share Today, Change Tomorrow | Evan Barker & Amanda Cantrell Roche | How can storytelling transform your leadership? Participants of this session will first take part in a Narrative 4 story exchange, a reciprocal storytelling experience designed to provoke empathy, curiosity, and perspective shift. Each participant will tell their partner a story based on one of several prompts, and then re-tell their partner’s story in the first person to the rest of the circle. We then reflect and break down the experience as a group. Next, participants will undergo training in story exchange facilitation, covering all aspects of planning and execution in detail. Considerable time will be devoted to designing story exchanges to work in each participant’s individual context. Participants will leave as certified Narrative 4 facilitators, each with a plan in hand of how to use story exchange to open minds and lead with empathy.

Find more detailed track descriptions and presenter information on Brushy Fork's website at: https://www.berea.edu/brushy-fork-institute/2024-brushy-fork-leadership-summit

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Berea College, 101 Chestnut Street, Berea, United States