Overview

LLL Heartland is a membership organization of La Leche League International (LLLI) volunteers ("Leaders"), who have each made a personal commitment to a standard of behavior, and have agreed to demonstrate to each other that they are maintaining that standard. The standard is intended to reflect the essential LLLI policies regarding mother-to-mother interaction and the Leader's interaction with the public.

Strategic Intent

Heartland's membership agreement is intended to be the locus around which an alternative system of Leader accountability and support can grow. The original design criteria for this system were demanding:

• Capable of linking an unlimited number of mothers, irrespective of language, culture or geographic location, without becoming difficult or expensive to administer.
• Be built out of highly localized “mother-to-mother” interactions.
• Enable the growth of strong communities of practice and belief, without centralized control.
• Never violate a mother’s right to trust her own instincts and make her own decisions (this precludes most traditional hierarchical structures).

Design History

The design of Heartland's organizational strategy was based on three years of work by hundreds of LLL Leaders worldwide to articulate the defining heart of LLL's experience. This work resulted in three distinct work products, and one affirmation:

1. A purpose statement, describing what held together mothers and Leaders in this work.
2. A set of principles, which collectively would set the parameters for organizational structures and policies.
3. An organizational concept, which described a way that a system of parts and participants could be created that was consistent with the purpose and principles.
4. An affirmation that the LLLI Philosophy was the best statement of common beliefs about breastfeeding that existed within the LLL community.

For another year, a small workgroup worked with the LLLI Board of Directors and then with a state-level LLLI "area" in Missouri to develop an implementation plan that was itself consistent with the set of principles. It was decided, for example, that no organizational part of LLLI, nor any individual Leader would be forced to adopt a new structure. Instead, a new organizational option for Leaders and areas would be created that would parallel the existing structure and in which participation would be voluntary.

Basic Structure

The existing structure of LLLI is a conventional hierarchical structure in which authority to oversee volunteer activity is delegated by the Executive Director first to a "division", of which there are three, two in the US and one internationally, and then to "areas", of which there are several dozen, which usually correspond to state or national boundaries, or multiples thereof. Leaders receive technical support and oversight from the area with jurisdiction over their geographic location. There are, of course, periodic exceptions to this pattern, but they are relatively few.

The new option for Leaders is for them to organize new areas, each of which is a membership corporation, based on the formal acceptance of the personal commitment mentioned above, a so-called "Core Leader agreement." These areas then organize themselves into an "area network", also a membership corporation, based on a "Core Area agreement" that closely parallels the Leaders' agreement. This area network, which is effectively a membership corporation of all Leaders adopting the core Leader agreement, then enters into a contract with LLLI to provide support to themselves and create a system of mutual accountability to LLLI policies, and those additional policies that they voluntarily impose on themselves.

Such a system does not primarily use authority to maintain coherence, but rather it uses an enforceable agreement among the participating Leaders and LLLI.

Fractal Pattern(s)

Although not an intentional artifact of the design process, I have found it interesting that the two major aspects of the organizational concept, accountability and consensus, tend to have very different patters when drawn, almost opposite in fact. For example, accountability is stylistically peer-to-peer, and does not need a "center" to function effectively. Consensus, on the other hand, is precisely such a "centering" of a group, and is often nested.

Instinctively, I would think that having two such structure simultaneously present within an organization would make it more robust, but that is only conjecture.