Mental Well-being for Community Leaders (MW)
Mental Well-being for Community Leaders (MW)
Supporting Individual, Team, and Community Well-being in High-Pressure Leadership Roles
Community leaders, economic developers, elected officials, volunteers, and organizational leaders often operate in environments characterized by high expectations, limited resources, public scrutiny, and complex community challenges. While these roles are rewarding, they can also create significant stress, fatigue, and burnout that affect individuals, teams, and organizations.
Mental Well-being for Community Leaders (MW) is designed to help participants recognize, understand, and respond to the unique pressures associated with community leadership. The course provides practical tools and strategies to support personal resilience, foster healthy workplace cultures, strengthen team well-being, and navigate the emotional challenges that can arise during periods of change, disruption, crisis, or recovery.
Participants will explore the relationship between well-being and effective leadership, learn to recognize signs of stress and burnout, and gain practical approaches for maintaining their own mental well-being while supporting others. The course also examines the role leaders play in creating psychologically safe workplaces, supporting teams through adversity, and helping communities recover from disasters, crises, and prolonged periods of uncertainty.
Rather than serving as a clinical mental health program, MW focuses on equipping leaders with practical, evidence-informed tools that can be applied in everyday situations. It emphasizes recognizing when support is needed, fostering resilience, having supportive conversations, and connecting people with appropriate resources while remaining within the boundaries of a leadership role.
This is an optional course within the Community Economic Development Certificate Program.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Explain how leader and team well-being support the Health and Social Services factor in EDA’s Community Economic Resilience (CER) framework and influence resilience across all six factors.
- Describe how well-being affects leadership effectiveness, decision-making, and relationships in high-pressure contexts.
- Recognize common signs of stress, distress, and burnout in thoughts, feelings, body, and behaviour.
- Use course self-assessment tools to reflect on current stress levels and coping capacity.
- Apply practical strategies to protect and strengthen personal resilience, including self-care, boundaries, and mindset shifts.
- Explain the Wellness Continuum and Mental Health Continuum and use them to recognize shifts in personal and team well-being.
- Apply the OSCAR communication technique and other principles for supporting teams under stress and public scrutiny.
- Identify common stressors for teams in high-accountability environments and describe ways to respond constructively.
- Describe the emotional arc of disaster and crisis events and what leaders can expect of themselves and their teams at separate phases.
- Apply Psychological First Aid (Look, Listen, Link) appropriately within a non-clinical leadership role.
- Identify mental health and crisis support resources available to themselves, their teams, and their communities, and know when and how to activate them.
- Recognize the boundaries of a leader’s role in well-being conversations and explain when to listen, refer, and step back rather than counsel or diagnose.
Delivery Option & Cost
Individual
Online, self-directed learning. Available 24-7.
$195 Members $295 Non-Members
Group
Hybrid- Online:
Self-directed, augmented with live instructor sessions
$325 Members $435 Non-Members
In person:
Group session in your community. One day instructor-led online workshop.
$2950 Members $3450 Non-Members