From Co-design to Credential: Level 6 ILM Achieved
Cath McNally
We’ve come a long way since that first gathering of community leaders sketching out the Community Leadership Collective. What started as raw energy and shared ideas now holds a formal stamp: Level 6 Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) accreditation. It’s not just a badge – it’s proof that leadership grown from the ground up can meet the highest standards.
The road here was all about learning through doing. We co-designed a programme shaped by those early workshops – strong on real-world application, light on paperwork. But accreditation demands structure. The process was led by Cath – meeting with providers, weighing routes, and landing on ILM as the right fit for our values. Then came the deep dive – mapping our co-designed content to the ILM framework. Our community grounded sessions slotted in beautifully, but gaps showed up too – like our informal quality checks. These were then formalised those into robust processes, blending what leaders told us they needed with ILM’s rigour.
What did we learn? Thanks to support (and some funding) from the City and Guilds Foundation we learned that accreditation isn’t a box-ticking exercise; it’s a mirror. It revealed how our collective wisdom stacks up – and where polish makes it shine brighter for everyone involved. We saw that leaders don’t just need space to practise leading; they value credentials that carry weight in bigger systems, from funding bids to career choices. Iteration proved its worth too (we started informal, benchmarked rigorously, and ended stronger) showing us how to reach higher while remaining rooted in communities.
This isn’t the finish line. As CLC rolls out to more leaders across Scotland, we’ll keep sharing – the tweaks that work, the breakthroughs that surprise us. The moments that challenge us. Because learning in the open means owning the journey, credentials and all.
