Educators who work in community settings often encounter participants with a wide array of individual leadership beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Given this situation, one of the challenges we face is to identify effective methods and tools to teach leadership in community and organizational settings. As an educator, it is important to understand and use quality scholarship and theory in leadership education. At the same time, it is important to use educational methods that respect the life experiences of the participants and that are easy to understand and communicate. At the University of Minnesota Extension Service "U-Lead" program, we seek to balance the academic and scholarship portion of our work with the application of practical tools and methods that connect with the real-life leadership experiences of our participants. The purpose of this paper is to review the comprehensive leadership education framework we currently use and outline how it addresses this balance.