Certificate in Leadership

Flor is a clinical psychologist, Executive Coach graduate from INCAE Business School; Graduate from the Academy for Leaders at the Center for Courage and Renewal, US; Trainer Certified in Restorative Practices by International Institute for Restorative Practices; Certified in Nonviolent Communication by Bay NVC, San Francisco, US; Participant and Co-Facilitator within the international movement Art of Hosting, which profoundly influenced her vision of Collaborative Leadership. Has participated recently in the U. Academy Presencing Foundation Program. 

Flor is also Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Asociación Para Liderazgo en Guatemala, where she designs and facilitates transformative processes and professional formation for NGOs and community leaders of Central America since 2012, in the belief that everyone has the potential to be agents of change and that collaborative processes are the way to create new possibilities in organizations and in society. 

Guatemala is a country crossed by an internal armed conflict that spanned over 30 years, leaving social and territorial fragmentation and some of the lowest human development indicators in the region as immediate consequences that are still present.

Civil society and non for profit organizations do not escape that reality, showing few collaborative and exchange networks, situation that complicates collaborative and joint work in the  most remote and relegated areas of the country. There is also a lack of training resources for leaders outside the country’s capital, which results in organizations that count with leaders with little or no formation. 

With our Certificate in Leadership and Collaboration we seek to walk along local leaders, delivering tools and social technologies to strengthen their leadership skills. Our approach is unique and innovative, centered in people and their communities, and looking to transfer skills and knowledge from a horizontal and collaborative learning philosophy.

Guatemala has suffered a thirty-year internal armed conflict that erased a generation of more than 200,000 people, most of whom were indigenous.

Nowadays, nearly a quarter of the nation lives in extreme poverty. Literacy rates hang around 75% for Guatemalans over age 18 and the country holds the fourth-highest malnutrition rate in the world. Additionally, the changing nature of the country’s political leadership has exacerbated the government’s unreliability as a source of development aid. Unstable institutions and lack of legal certainty is a deficit that affects the society in general and also civil society organizations.

Many of the organizations responding the challenges listed above face a general leadership deficit — meaning that, as a result of the absence of high-quality leadership education, it is difficult for organizations to have expert leaders. 

In particular, there is a lack of strong leadership among NGOs and public institutions that seek meaningful and progressive change. NGOs may have difficulties in finding and attracting high-quality leaders; in other cases, the current direction of these organizations (even if they have good intentions) frequently demonstrates ineffective leadership for their own organization, as well as for the NGO community in general. 

Our Certificate in Leadership and Collaboration is a six module program for leaders from non profit organizations leaders across Central America to learn from international experts as well as fellow participants in a curriculum that uses Restorative Practices, Social Technologies from Art of Hosting for collaborative leadership. Circles of Trust, practical tools inspired by the UTheory of the Presencing Institute and MIT and other widely known methodologies. 

We prioritize working with grassroots, community based organizations that work with indigenous communities across Guatemala and Central America, and most of the organization’s leaders that participate are also respected representatives in their communities.

Our Certificate aims to form organization’s representatives and give them the necessary tools to become the best leaders for their organizations and to enhance their communities’ capacity to solve local challenging and pressing issues. The Certificate will allow them to apply the best practices for their organization and enhance the collaboration within civil society and non profit organizations in Guatemala and Central America. We strongly believe that forming and providing tools for leaders in the non for profit sector is the best way for expanding good governance in our region and can be a gamechanger in the long run.

We aim to enhance the capacities and knowledge of community based organizations’ leaders. The majority of leaders we work with come from small community based organizations located in remote areas, with scarce or no access to learning tools and resources.

Every year we run a diagnosys to identify their needs, and interests. This is essential for us to build a curriculum that better suits their needs and interests, and because without their participation the certification tools and subjects would not be useful or applicable to their local realities and needs.

We also work with local leaders in bringing to their communities our Workshops for Local Development, a project that aims to develop local communities and enhance their capacities to solve the most pressing and challenging issues they face in their daily lives. In this way we can assess the impact of our certification in our participants and also bring organizational and development tools to other local organizations that otherwise would not have access to learning activities.

Our project delivers different social technologies and tools to build a collaborative culture among nonprofit leaders in Guatemala and the region, and shift from individual efforts and isolated solutions to collaboration, networking and local community centered solutions that can be replicated in different places of the country and the region. We achieve this by forming leaders from completely different ethnic groups and regions, with different interests and views on how to address and change their realities and their communities. We have seen that in safe spaces, beliefs about "the other" also change, polarized positions are transformed into respect and appreciation.

The idea came from first-person experience: receiving the responsibility of leading a large team in an organization, without being an experienced leader. At that time we had access to leadership training with iLeap, an organization located in Seattle. After the iLeap program, we were left thinking that just as it helped us, surely there were many more leaders struggling to do their best to make their programs successful and impactful, but without the necessary tools. We wanted others to strengthen their leadership as well, so we decided to start.  ALG started in 2012, being legally registered as a non-profit organization in 2013. We invited national and international organizations’ leaders to participate in discussion tables and we created our program curriculum. 

Those discussion tables, as well as many conversations and research, let us see the need of leaders from different organizations in the region, and realized that there was a lack of access to training resources for leaders of non profit organizations, especially in remote areas of geographically dispersed countries with small or no presence of state agencies and organized crime and drug trafficking structures in many regions, as it is in Central America.

I have always felt a natural call to accompany the development and growth of people. This call was manifested in my professional life since I was a children's teacher, later as a psychologist, as a university professor and as manager. Today it manifests itself by accompanying leaders who alleviate some pain in the world, serving and accompanying unique individuals who give their lives to meaningful purposes makes sense to me. I cannot be everywhere or do everything that so many others do, but I can be one with them for a moment, as they nurture themselves to fulfill their mission again. With this impulse I work everyday at ALG.

I also believe that it is important that my country and the Central American region have a program that understands the local context, in which change makers can meet, interact in a safe space that nurtures not only their skills but their purposes. From there we will be able to foster more collaboratively and freely the collaborative leadership that the world needs today to enable other futures to emerge.

Our experience has been enhanced along the years. Since our beginning in 2012, we had a leadership training in ILeap, in Seattle. After that training we invited national and foreign organization leaders to participate in dialogue roundtables and that is how we created our program curriculum.

Our personnel have been formed in the Center for Courage & Renewal, in Nonviolent communication with Miki Kashtan of Bay NVC; in Restorative Practices with the International Institute in Restorative Practices; in participative leadership with Art of Hosting; Executive Coaching with INCAE, Empowered Voices in the University of Colorado; Ulab Theory with the Presencing Institute/MIT, amongst others.

We also have institutional collaborations with the following organizations:

- John Jay College: we are working in a joint collaborative research project on the impact of restorative practices in organizations.

- UN UPeace: UPeace representatives facilitate one of our units of our Certificate in Collaborative Leadership.

- International Institute in Restorative Practices: we received training for our facilitators on how to conduct restorative circles.

- Center for Courage & Renewal: we were granted with fellowships to participate in different learning processes.

169 leaders formed in our Certificate in Collaborative Leadership. 

72 leaders formed in our mentoring trainings and are participating mentoring our Certificate participants.

70 persons participated in our Workshops for Local Development.

68 workshops in organizational development with other organizations, with 1737 participants.

We gave more than 70 workshops on leadership, collaboration and restorative practices to more than 1700 participants from different NGOs in the region. 

The current situation represents a huge challenge for all the organizations in the country, and ALG is not an exception. Before the pandemic, all our activities were carried out in-person, and with the irruption of COVID-19 in the country, the closing of borders and travel ban between provinces in the country has forced us to postpone some activities and to migrate many others to virtual modality, in a country where only a 29,3% of the population has access to internet.  

Despite this adverse context regarding possibilities and access to internet of our participants, who live in their majority in remote areas with limited or no connectivity, we were able to continue with our activities in a distance-teaching modality, with high attendance levels. Likewise, we developed a cycle of webinars and learning activities for our community in social networks, with the objective of sharing knowledge that is free and accessible to everyone.

The Co-founder and ALG first Executive Director had an authoritarian leadership style, inconsistent with what we were teaching and this hurt her relationships with the Board, main donor and the team. 

By that time I was Program Director. One day, pressed by the Board to deliver clear records, she just left. We were in our third edition of the main program, had a whole group of leaders in training, a team that was feeling lost and a Board ready to close the organization due to their disappointment with the director. I took responsibility, we couldn't leave that cohort halfway, and I truly believed in the mission; I did co-founded ALG after all, and was not going to let go. 

I asked the board to let me finish the program with the current cohort. In those months I managed to organize finances, legal matters, innovate the program, created a mentoring program, developed a website and social media presence and form a faculty group. I included the team in everything I could. I stated that one of our main guidelines would be "Lead from Within" and we would never do something inside ALG contrary to what we taught leaders.

Our impact (2012-2020)

169 leaders formed in our Certificate in Collaborative Leadership. 

72 leaders formed in our mentoring trainings and are participating mentoring our Certificate participants.

70 persons participated in our Workshops for Local Development.

68 workshops in organizational development with other organizations, with 1737 participants.

We gave more than 70 workshops on leadership, collaboration and restorative practices to more than 1700 participants from different NGOs in the region. 

Future impact (2021-2024)

120 leaders formed in our Certificate

80 mentors formed in our mentoring trainings

240 persons participating in our Workshops for Local Development