The Social Change Model — the Seven C's
Sooner or later somebody asks what all this is for. Most boards skip that question as awkward; this work treats it as the main one.
Seven values mean nothing until you can say what changes because of them. That is the eighth element — Change; the seven C's turn around it across three levels: individual, group and community.
- Consciousness of Selfwhether you know why this club matters to you at all
- Congruencewhether you act the way you talk in the meeting
- Commitmentwhether you stay once the work stops being interesting
- Collaborationwhether the work is done together or each in their own corner
- Common Purposewhether everyone names the same aim when asked separately
- Controversy with Civilitywhether you can disagree out loud and stay on the team
- Citizenshipwhether the club gives anything beyond its own membership
At your next meeting ask everyone in writing: what did our work this term change for people who are not members? If the answers differ, or there are none, that is your next job.
Do not overdo this part: A group of practitioners argued the seven values out around a table; the evidence came later. Use them as a list of questions, not as a measuring device.
The model was developed between 1993 and 1996 by an "Ensemble" convened by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), funded under a US Department of Education Eisenhower Leadership Development grant. Contributors included, among others, Alexander W. Astin, Helen S. Astin, Susan R. Komives, Carole Leland, Nance Lucas and Dennis Roberts. The primary publication is A Social Change Model of Leadership Development: Guidebook, Version III (HERI, UCLA, 1996), still freely available as a PDF.
The full biography is on the public version →
No freely licensed likeness of this person exists, so this is a generated emblem. It is not a portrait.
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.
These screens carry out this specific work. Every published work in the library also has at least an exercise — it is at the foot of this page.
- 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.
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.
- Open the source
- In copyright
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
Opens in the member workspace — you need to be signed in.
The same work written at length: what it claims and what its evidence is worth.