Adaptive Leadership in Human Services Network

The Adaptive Leadership in Human Services Network is based at NYU Silver and led by Master Teacher; Clinical Associate Professor; Katherine and Howard Aibel Executive-in Residence Linda Lausell Bryant. Founded in 2016, the network enables students, alumni, and human service practitioners to learn and apply the adaptive framework to engage challenges and support social change in their work. This growing community aims to promote connection and collaboration by engaging complex barriers to social justice in the human services field.

In 2016, with funding from the B. Robert Williamson Jr. Foundation and the Katherine and Howard Aibel Foundation, Dr. Lausell Bryant and Adjunct Lecturer Marc Manashil established an Adaptive Leadership Fellowship at NYU Silver for up to 15 second-year MSW students per year. The competitive fellowship features intensive weekend seminars on the adaptive leadership framework, which provides a set of strategies and tools to help practitioners bring about necessary change within organizations and communities. Fellows also receive coaching and guidance to help them directly apply what they have learned to challenges they have identified at their field placement agencies, their communities, or the school itself. 

Dr. Lausell Bryant and Mr. Manashil have also incorporated adaptive leadership training into the School’s MSW-level, macro-focused Social Work Practice III curriculum, and introduced an MSW-level elective on Exercising Leadership in the Non-Profit and Public Sectors. Furthermore, they created and teach a required course on Adaptive Leadership for Organizational Change for students in the School’s DSW program; integrated adaptive leadership concepts in the School’s Post-Masters Certificate program in Executive Leadership in the Not-for-Profit Sector; and designed and presented multiple two-day workshops on nonprofit and public sector leadership for a post-masters audience.

In 2018, Dr. Lausell Bryant was awarded a grant from the New York Community Trust to replicate NYU Silver’s robust social work leadership training program at a public graduate school of social work and establish a Social Work Leadership Development Institute at NYU Silver. Under that grant, our Adaptive Leadership Fellowship program was expanded in 2020 to include not only 15 MSW students from NYU Silver but also 10 MSW students from CUNY's College of Staten Island Department of Social Work. 

In addition, the Adaptive Leadership in Human Services Network holds periodic events for students, alumni, and human service practitioners, such as the November 2020 panel “Facing Racism in Human Services through the Adaptive Framework.” 

Dr. Linda Lausell Bryant

Master Teacher, Clinical Associate Professor, and the Katherine and Howard Aibel Executive-in-Residence

Email: linda.lausellbryant@nyu.edu
Phone: (212) 998-4309