The first academic contribution from the Latin American affiliate of Sophia University Institute is a diploma course dedicated to leadership which is participative, inclusive, team-oriented and environmental: community leadership. What topics and needs does it want to address? Interview with Lucas Cerviño, professor of theology, and Candela Fraccaro, Argentinean student In today’s world, marked by major economic and social challenges exacerbated by the pandemic, the Sophia University Institute in Latin America and the Caribbean is responding to these needs with a new Diploma course in Community Leadership. We spoke about this with Lucas Cerviño, professor of theology and co-responsible for the youth school in the Focolare’s little town El Diamante (Mexico) and a member of the team coordinating the course.  Cerviño explains: “We are living through a change of epoch, in which Pope Francis (as we read in Evangelii Gaudium) sees a crisis of community commitment.  We thought that in order to overcome this condition in a positive way it is necessary to promote a new style of leadership, no longer personalistic, centred on management and decision-making. At the same time, we have seen that in many places in Latin America, research is being carried out, there are experiences and proposals for community commitment. The course was created to bring together the need for renewed leadership with these seeds of new life”. Today’s world is grappling with the pandemic challenge. In this context, what needs do you want to respond to? Lucas Cerviño: “We believe that in order to overcome the pandemic we need to work together going beyond diversity, to promote an awareness that we have a common origin, an interdependence in the present and we are moving towards a common horizon. Our course wants to offer its contribution to this process”. What are the topics and training objectives of the course? Lucas Cerviño: “The course is aimed at all those who have, or are candidates for, a leadership role in the economic, political, religious or third sector, and it offers them the opportunity to practically rethink or structure their leadership. To this end, we offer knowledge, resources, strategies and skills to build a leadership that knows how to generate, preserve and enhance relational assets; facilitate synergetic, relational and cooperative practices and tools to generate more sustainable processes in different social spheres. In terms of content, the relationship between the person and the community is investigated, and we talk about sustainable development, fraternity and citizenship, social cohesion in diversity, community learning, economic management and communion, synodality and religious experience”. The teaching method is also innovative… Lucas Cerviño: “It would be a contradiction to offer a course on community leadership and then run it in a unilateral way. We need to go beyond the traditional concept of teaching to open up to community and creative learning that focuses on interpersonal relationships. The course is therefore both theoretical and practical. It is structured according to learning communities: in addition to following the lessons, participants join in groups of six or seven people and, accompanied by a tutor, create a space for reflection and community knowledge. Each participant is then supported by a tutor to develop a concrete intervention project that applies the course content. The characteristics of the course mean that the participants, who come from nine countries, including young people in their twenties and others almost at the point of retirement; students and professionals. All motivated to learn together”. Candela Fraccaro is one of the youngest students. We asked her: what made you decide to undertake a course in community leadership? Candela Fraccaro: “I am urged on by the commitment that I have been carrying out for some years with other young people in the Piedras Blancas suburb, in the city of Godoy Cruz, near Mendoza (Argentina). Here we run a toy library to educate children through play, we run workshops for teenagers, we help provide meals for children in need and together with the Youth for a United World of the Focolare Movement, we support a school. I lead some of these activities and so I feel that the course can give me tools to set up a project to help us channel our efforts”. The dialogical method is an integral part of the course. What positive elements do you see? Candela Fraccaro: “This method invites us to value diversity, to turn it into an enrichment, and proposes dialogue as a tool for building together. It is based on respect, listening and openness, and offers the opportunity to express oneself freely without imposing one’s own idea. In this way, the teaching-learning process is more enriching and everyone feels an active part of the process”.

Claudia Di Lorenzi