The Center for Nursing Leadership:
A Dynamic Learning Community

The Center for Nursing Leadership is a learning community for nurses who see themselves as leaders. By sustaining the community's learning, as well as disseminating its learning to others, the Center's goal is to offer transformational leadership to health care. The goal is not to assist members in honing skills and capacities for leadership positions. Rather, the Center focuses on deepening one's sense of self to create a genuine and authentic leader whose values engage others for shared endeavors.

CNL Members co-create the curriculum in partnership with selected faculty, including some of the Center members and other experts who represent the Native American, Asian and African healing traditions, as well as those who offer a circle process for sharing leadership in both easy times and in conflict, and capacity building for formal negotiation. The learning is deep, as well as broad, based on self-initiative and responding to life's learning opportunities with mindfulness and value for both self and other.

By inviting and celebrating diversity, each Center member can reaffirm those values and beliefs essential to being a leader in today's fast-paced and ever changing health care environment. As a community, all members stretch to find new and unique ways for knowing, being and leading.

The Center has adopted community as a collective way of being. In an organization, the focus is function, in community, it is relationship. The Center offers an arena to hone expertise in building community. Be being authentic, each member can engage others in shared endeavors without resorting to the authority of a leadership position.

The Center adds to its membership every year. The curriculum extends beyond the first year or the Journey Toward Mastery, to being part of the dynamic learning community.

Transitioned into a not-for-profit legal entity in July 1999, the Center began under the umbrella of a partnership of the American Organization of Nurse Executives and the Network for Healthcare Management in 1994. The original and ongoing source of funding is the Hill-Rom Corporation, a leader in patient care products.