Welcome Day

Taking place in person in Central London, the Welcome Day will offer you an opportunity to meet your fellow participants and programme facilitators; find out more about what to expect from Aspiring Leaders; and start thinking about your personal objectives for the programme.

Workshops

The aim of this programme is to offer you the opportunity to explore, reflect and develop your knowledge and skills, so that you can become an effective leader. You'll be given an opportunity to build your resilience, well-being and confidence to allow you to lead from the front. The programme will support you to:

  • Expand your understanding of how you think and process so that you can communicate more effectively with others
  • Explore your leadership aspirations
  • Identify areas for growth
  • Craft your vision and values
  • Engage in reflective practice
  • Learn how to create safe, inclusive working environments
  • Learn how to develop teams
  • Overcome barriers to effective leadership
  • Navigate management challenges
  • Develop key leadership skills.

Module 1 – leadership aspirations

This module includes:

  • Why lead?
  • Empowering and disempowering leadership
  • Inspiring leaders
  • Identify strengths and areas of growth
  • Reflective practice
  • Goal setting

Module 2 – leadership in the homelessness sector

This module includes:

  • Progress and reflections
  • Vision and values
  • Leadership versus management
  • Lived experience and inclusive leadership
  • Psychological safety and Trauma Informed Practice
  • Listening and communication skills
  • Goal setting

Module 3 – keys to effective leadership (part 1)

This module includes:

  • Progress and reflections
  • Understanding barriers
  • Boundaries and expectations
  • Stress and overwhelm
  • Reflective leadership
  • Goal setting

Module 4 – keys to effective leadership (part 2)

This module includes:

  • Progress and reflections
  • Thriving
  • Failure as an opportunity
  • Supporting staff through change
  • Effective delegation
  • Goal setting

Module 5: Nurturing potential

This module includes:

  • Progress and reflections
  • Doing versus being a manager
  • Building trust/collaboration and co-creation
  • Understanding team needs
  • Strengths based leadership
  • Coaching skills
  • Goal setting

Module 6: leadership legacy

This module includes:

  • Progress and reflections
  • Review motivations
  • Review programme experience
  • Your leadership legacy
  • Next steps

Action Learning Sets

Action Learning is a powerful tool for developing critical-thinking, problem-solving, creative solutions and innovative practice. Action Learning Sets are a simple way to learn from each other, using the combined wisdom and skills of a diverse group of people to work through real situations faced in the workplace.

You will meet four times in groups of eight, with a trained facilitator.

Celebration Day

We round off the programme with a Celebration Day in central London - an opportunity to reflect on our own and each other's successes over the duration of the programme, think through next steps and understand how participants can continue to work together and support each other.

Facilitators

  • Rachel Heavens associate coach

    Rachael Heavens

    Rachel has a background in education and training, having been a teacher at FE level. She currently facilitates a number of leadership programmes which include reflective practice, inquiry with listening and incisive questioning. She is also an ACC certified coach with the ICF and works as an associate coach in the private sector. Rachel has worked in homelessness since 2019, first with Southdown Housing and later with BHT Sussex. She started in front line working and progressed to management, most recently as a Team Leader for frontline workers in housing and homelessness. She is trained in using a Trauma informed and PIE approach when working with her team and their clients.
  • Coach-Fran-Borg-Wheeler

    Fran Borg-Wheeler

    As a former small charity CEO, Fran is a strong advocate for the transformational power of leadership development for third sector leaders and managers. The homelessness sector, in particular, has a special place in her heart, having volunteered for Crisis and De Paul in her teens and later having set up and co-ordinated a Nightstop scheme. Throughout her leadership coaching, training and facilitation, Fran focusses on supporting charity leaders to a) boost their impact b) whilst thriving. She also has a passion for reducing barriers to inclusion for charity leaders from under-represented communities. She is very much looking forward to supporting aspiring leaders, with her co-facilitator, Rachel Heavens, through Homeless Link's leadership development programme.
  • Coach-Amanda-Tooth

    Amanda Tooth

    Amanda is an experienced facilitator and coach. She has been coaching leaders 1:1 and in teams/groups for several years. Amanda provides coaching and Action Learning Sets (ALS) across sectors as well as internationally. It was her personal experience of being a member of an Action Learning Set that elicited the desire to train as an action learning facilitator. Amanda saw how this empowering simple process could help people to overcome what seemed to be complicated or complex issues. It also resonated with her deeply held beliefs that listening is key, questioning is a skill, and change happens when we get the opportunity to look at things from a different perspective in a safe space.
  • Miranda Lewis

    Miranda Lewis

    Miranda has over twenty five years’ experience of working with the charity sector. She is Director of m2 consultants, an organisation supporting the sector with strategic facilitation, learning partnerships and training. She has worked with Homeless Link as learning partner to the Leadership programme, and to evaluate wider commissioned services. She is an experienced Action Learning Set facilitator and qualified personal and professional coach.