11: Leadership in At-Risk Communities

Rarely have the poor, impoverished, marginalized, and disadvantaged been a focus of leadership study. Burns (2003), in his most recent book, revisits the transforming leadership theory he formulated in 1978 and examines how leaders ultimately facilitate life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “Nothing offers so clear and urgent a challenge to leadership, nothing tests it so decisively, as human wants and needs” (2003, p. 146). He identifies how leadership has failed in this regard when human need is addressed in non-organizational terms. He states that,

Burns argues that alleviating poverty and empowering the poor is the greatest challenge to leadership and should be our greatest concern. For him the central problem is a lack of leadership that takes a hard view of the misconceptions of those “helpers” of the poor and learns to draw close to the poor, to see their problems as they see them. Burns finishes by stating that strategic leadership is the vital link in empowering the dispossessed and poses the question; can leadership develop from the bottom up (Burns, 2003, p. 236)?