The Social Change Model — the Seven C's
UCLA HERI's model names seven values across three levels, plus an eighth element — Change itself — that gives the others their point. It is the values layer beneath gslk's culture.
Leadership as a purposeful, collaborative, values-based process leading to social change — no title required.
- The situation
The club recruits plenty of volunteers each year, but the work ends inside the club: events for its own members, photos on its own account.
- What the model says
Six of the C's are in place and citizenship is missing — so the eighth element is missing too: there is no change for all of this to serve.
- What you do
For the next event name one specific recipient outside the club — a faculty, a school, a neighbourhood — and say out loud what they get from it.
What it claims
The model holds that leadership is a purposeful, collaborative, values-based process leading to positive social change, and that it requires neither a title nor an office. The values sit at three levels. Individual: Consciousness of Self, Congruence (alignment between beliefs and actions), Commitment. Group: Collaboration, Common Purpose, Controversy with Civility. Community: Citizenship.
The eighth element — Change — is NOT one of the seven C's. It is the hub the seven serve, and "the Eight C's" is a common error worth avoiding.
Honestly about the evidence, because there is an important distinction here. The 1996 guidebook is a practitioner and curricular document: the Seven C's were reasoned and negotiated within the ensemble, not extracted from data. Empirical substance arrived later, through the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS) and the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL, from 2006; hundreds of institutions, more than 300,000 participants). Confirmatory factor analysis has replicated the constructs, with subscale reliabilities in roughly the .69–.92 range.
But there is a partial circularity in that: SRLS was built specifically to measure this model, so finding a seven-ish factor structure in it confirms mainly that the items were written to the blueprint, not that the model carves reality at its joints. The data are also student self-reports of leadership capacity rather than observed behaviour or outcomes, and mostly cross-sectional. There is inside criticism too: John Dugan and colleagues argue that mainstream leadership-development models are silent on power and equity, and that the "Controversy with Civility" framing can function to protect comfort rather than to confront structural power.
Licensing: the model is free and openly used — the guidebook is public, and the Seven C's vocabulary is used by hundreds of universities. The SRLS instrument is not: it is sold through the University of Maryland as paid per-respondent vouchers. So a programme can be built on the Seven C's for free; measuring it with SRLS cannot.
Who created it
Why this is your problem
We have not written a practice step for this one yet. When we do, it will be as concrete as the rest.
Why gslk uses it
It is the only framework on this list that answers the question "what is all this for". It lets a club measure not just its own maturity but whether its work changes anything beyond campus — which connects directly to the "impact on society" strand of VMU's own strategy. There is a second, purely practical reason: the Seven C's require no position, which suits an organisation where leadership is shared across a team rather than held by the president alone.
Where it runs in the product
- The programme's values frame and Level 3 — the social-impact strand: pointing club activity outward, at the city and the region.
- The Ohio State maturity framework gslk uses at Level 2 is itself informed by this model — so the two layers speak the same language.
- There is no Seven C's score and there will not be one. One of the seven — citizenship, the "outside the club" one — does have an exercise: "Who it was for", at the foot of this page. Impact in gslk is measured against a specific piece of work: an impact form is filled in when an objective is finished (/admin/objectives), and competency points are computed from its answers. The model shapes the programme's content and language rather than a score — we do not use SRLS, so there is no "7C score" in the product and there will not be one without a separate licence.
Source
Higher Education Research Institute. (1996). A Social Change Model of Leadership Development: Guidebook, Version III. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles.
Read the primary source ↗The primary source is in copyright. This page retells it in our own words and cites it rather than reproducing it.
These works are related to the one you just read — and not by accident:
shared competencies: Impact and responsibility, Mobilising others
shared competencies: Impact and responsibility, Mobilising others
same competency: Impact and responsibility
same competency: Impact and responsibility
Of the ten gslk competency domains, this work grounds:
The same work written for a member: what to do with it in the club.