Leadership Development Institute

 The LDI seeks to graduate students with the leadership skills and values needed to lead highly effective economic and social development programs. Furthermore, it seeks to be exemplary in all that it does and to develop and maintain high credibility and legitimacy, and high standards of performance in its programs and for its students, staff and faculty.

Mission – Develop leaders that serve.

The Leadership Development Institute integrates transformational, servant, social change and other models of leadership with best practices in student development and an active learning process of social engagement with a global perspective. We work primarily in Morocco and the MENA region to change the way leadership is viewed and done.

Our principles inform all that we do and strive to develop in our students. Our principles include the following:

• Integrity – consistency between our values and actions, our word and our deed; doing what we say we will do.

• Ethics – striving to always follow high ethical standards.

• Be innovative – developing better ways to build leaders.

• Taking initiative and following through – seeing what needs to be done and doing it with integrity.

• Bottom up approach to leadership – leadership does not come with position. Leaders are grown by building their strengths and overcoming their weaknesses.

• Equitable and egalitarian – the equal value and treatment of every person is not compromised. The wealthy, powerful or privileged are no better (or worse) than anyone else.

Vision – Shift consciousness from traditional to a modern, servant, global paradigm of leadership.

To achieve this vision, the LDI will become self-sustainable, expand our impact beyond Ifrane and AUI to the MENA region and the developing world, and become the preeminent leadership program in the MENA region.

The Leadership Development Institute (LDI) started in the spring of 2008 when a student asked, “This is an American style university, so why don’t we have an American style leadership program?”The Leadership Development Institute uniquely develops selected students to become global leaders by adapting the best American leadership development research and practices to the needs of Moroccan students and Moroccan society. The LDI is the first such program in Morocco, one of two in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region, and one of very few in the developing world. From its roots, the LDI is a co-curricular program teaching leadership skills through experience and service. And we seek to impact society and the quality of leadership much more broadly. Our mission is two-fold: to develop leaders for Morocco’s future and to improve leadership in the developing world.

To ensure that our program has the high standard of the leadership programs in America, the LDI uses the standards set by the Council for the Advancement of Standards (CAS) in Higher Education to assess its program.