The Bergen LEADS seminar year is designed to provide an exciting leadership and learning experience, unlike any other our participants may have had. Our field trips and site visits will bring Bergen County to life, so bring your walking shoes! You might take a ride on the Hackensack River, visit a shelter for homeless families, get a crash course in firefighting, sit in on a charter school classroom, visit the County jail or try to obtain healthcare at a local clinic.

When you’re not exploring the County, you’ll be intrigued by dynamic guests with varying viewpoints who debate topical issues. LEADS participants will have the opportunity to craft questions and interview leaders with many different opinions from every sector of the County and the economy.

Woven throughout each seminar day will be exercises and experiences to help you better understand yourself as a leader – your motivations, your strengths, your own unique style. Bergen LEADS will help you to assemble a leadership toolbox by providing you with practical, easy-to-implement tools to better motivate, manage and move people – and your ideas – forward.

The pinnacle of the Bergen LEADS experience is that, ultimately, we help you figure out what to do with your newfound knowledge of Bergen County and your leadership skills. Community trusteeship – serving the primary needs of others by holding the community in trust – is a critical component of Bergen LEADS. It may, in fact, be the most important, since what you do after Bergen LEADS is what determines the future of our County. Will you champion a cause? Serve on a non-profit board? Run for office? Incorporate a new non-profit? Launch a social enterprise venture? What will YOU DO? We’ll help you chart a course for your own future.

Our schedule for the Class of 2008-2009:

All Issue Days will begin and end at Bergen Community College in Paramus. Each day will be full of activities, information and lots of moving around. A typical Issue Day might look like this: