Page 43 - BusinessWest December 8, 2021
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Taking a Leadership Role
Lora Wondolowski Looks for New Opportunities for LPV
By George O’Brien
When Lora Wondolowski became founding executive director of Leadership Pioneer Valley (LPV), it certainly wasn’t with the expectation that she would one day be hard at work planning 10-year anniversary celebrations.
Indeed, Wondolowski said it was more her style, her pattern, to launch organizations and programs, stabilize and build them, and then move onto something else, probably in four or five years, as she did with her previous assignment, as founding director of the Massachusetts League of Environ- mental Voters and the Environmental Voters Edu- cation Fund in Boston.
“I’m someone who gets restless — who has trouble staying,” she said in reference to the many lines in the ‘work history’ section of her résumé. “My last two organizations, this one and the last one, were startups, and if I look at the trajectory of my career, a lot of the work I’ve done over the years is starting new programs or new organizations. I didn’t see myself able to sustain within an organi- zation; I thought I’d get bored.”
Suffice it to say that, in this job, she hasn’t.
When asked why, she said there are several rea- sons, starting with the inspiration she gets from the graduates of LPV’s LEAP program and their success stories (a list that includes exactly half of Business- West’s eight Women of Impact for 2021 — more on
            Lora Wondolowski says leadership is constantly changing and evolving, and that’s one of the many intangibles that has kept her at the helm of LPV.
“There’s a difference between leadership in crisis, which it was in the beginning — you had to make quick decisions in a certain way
— and then this sort of adaptive leadership, which we are now in, which is a lot about resilience and how to get people through change and things that are uncomfortable, because no one wants to do things differently.”
that later).
But there is more to Wondolowski’s lengthy stay
with LPV. Much more, as she explained.
“The work we do keeps changing and growing,
and that’s because leadership is ever-changing; our curriculum is ever-changing,” she explained. There is a lot to keep me engaged and energized
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DECEMBER 8, 2021 43
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