Impact Leadership: Transforming Complex Systems presents a comprehensive and inclusive leadership development model that addresses the challenge of access and representation in urban leadership and builds capacity to address intractable issues in complex systems.

The book introduces a multimodal, interdisciplinary and community-based approach to leadership development that addresses complex community and systemic challenges and it expands scholarship and research on leadership development that strengthens our understanding of how sustainable transformation is effected in different contexts. Urban communities face multiple issues in greater magnitude and concentration than other communities: income inequality, a deficient educational system, decreased social capital, police brutality, damaged race relations, a hostile political climate, and proportionately greater violence. Many communities are also severely impacted by income inequality, which has risen steadily over the last four decades and fosters inequality. Since organizational and political structures created often support the continued access and achievement of powerful groups, it becomes critical to empower and develop urban leaders for the transformation of their own communities for better outcomes.

Diane Forbes Berthoud is Vice President, Chief Inclusive Excellence and Institutional Effectiveness Officer, and a professor in the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA. She is also founding faculty (emeritus) of the RISE San Diego Leadership Program and affiliate faculty in Leadership Studies at the Elliot School of International Affairs of George Washington University, USA.

Zachary Green is Distinguished Professor of Practice in Leadership Studies and Senior Director of Leadership Development in The Nonprofit Institute at the University of San Diego, USA. He is also a lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA and founding lead faculty of the Leadership Coaching Program and RISE Urban Leadership Fellows Program at RISE San Diego, USA.