For the past eight years, the Charleston and Mattoon Chambers of Commerce have jointly presented the Leadership Coles County course.

Cindy Titus, executive director of the Charleston Chamber of Commerce, said the course was designed to develop leadership skills within community members.

The program has five full-day classroom courses and requires that participants in the course work with a local organization to help them with a certain problem or issue the organization is facing.

She said community organizations often provide her with ideas about projects they need help with or issues they are facing that could be used as projects for leadership cultivation.

While the classroom portions are important in providing participants with more information about themselves, Titus said the practical aspect of involvement that the projects provide is important as well.

“It’s kind of a nice blend of leadership theory and real world application,” she said.

This semester’s courses, which end April 20, were held at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center and included several community members from various career paths and organizations, including Eastern.

Titus said more than 200 community members have graduated from the program since it started in 2000.

When the course first started, Titus said she had to personally recruit many of the community members for the course.

Over time this has been less necessary as more businesses heard about the course and sponsored their employees for it, she added.

She said many area businesses often send at least a few representatives to the course each year because they have seen how effective the course is at making people better on the personal and professional level.

Titus said people who go through these classes are given many of the skills necessary to become successful in the area, and the results of these skills are evident by the kinds of positions many graduates have attained.

“We see many of these people popping up in various positions of leadership in the community,” she said.

One clear example of this is Coles Together President Angela Griffin, who credits the course with giving her many of the skills that allowed her to attain her position in Coles County.

“It just makes you a lot more open to people,” Griffin said.

Griffin said the main component of the course that helped her was learning how to be accepting of other peoples’ ideas and then working together to help come up with solutions to problems.

“First you learn about yourself, then you learn about other people,” she said.

Griffin said the Charleston/Mattoon area, which was once divided by conflicts, need to learn this kind of cooperation.

She said this course could help achieve this goal.

She said by working together regionally, communities like Mattoon and Charleston working together, and area citizens, can make Coles County a much better place.

One former course participant is Cheryl Noll, assistant chair of the School of Business at Eastern, who took part in the fall 2007 Leadership Coles County Course.

She said her time in the class taught her how to assess herself, see the positive and negative parts of herself and taught her how to extenuate those positive parts and improve those negative ones.

The project she was involved with during her time in the course was improving the recruitment methods of the area chapter of Habitat for Humanity.

Noll said her group focused on giving suggestions that could be used throughout the area in how to lead more Mattoon citizens to become involved with Habitat for Humanity.

Titus said that most of the area residents who were involved with Habitat for Humanity are from Charleston. She said Noll’s group went to many Mattoon residents and essentially recruited them to join the Habitat for Humanity board.

Titus also said the group suggested ways to eliminate paperwork for potential Habitat for Humanity homeowners and tried to eliminate certain misconceptions about Habitat for Humanity around the area, like the idea that homes built by them are free to the owners.

Noll said by working with the group and other Leadership members, she learned skills she could apply to her everyday job at Eastern, which makes her involvement well worth the time and effort.

“I’m glad I could take advantage of this opportunity,” she said.

Jordan Crook can be reached at 581-7495 or at jscrook@eiu.edu.