Everyone Leads

Building Leadership from the Community Up

Paul Schmitz

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470906033
• eBook ISBN: 9781118120743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Based on a proven leadership model, Everybody Leads shows how leadership can be found in uncommon places and reveals how to inspire and cultivate the leadership of those focused on social change. It shows how to take responsibility to work with developing leaders to make a difference and outlines the five key leadership values. Sponsored by Public Allies, the book helps leaders to connect across cultures, facilitate collaborative action, recognize and mobilize all of a community's assets, continuously learn, and be accountable to those they work with and those they serve.

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Part One

About Public Allies and the Concept that Everyone Leads

Chapter 1

Coming to the Conviction That Everyone Leads

Peter Hoeffel

Peter Hoeffel was working at a downtown Milwaukee deli, putting his philosophy degree from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee to work making sandwiches. One day, an energetic and friendly young African American woman walked into the shop and asked if she could hang a poster in the window to recruit young adults for Milwaukee's Public Allies program. Peter struck up a conversation and learned that she was looking for young people who were passionate about making a difference and who wanted to turn that passion into a career.

Peter, who was twenty-seven years old at the time, heard his calling. “I wanted to make the world a better place,” he says. “I didn't feel like too many places were looking to hire someone with a philosophy degree and a minor in Africology. I wanted to stop just talking about the social change that my friends and I would discuss, and Public Allies seemed like a great place for me to learn how to do just that.”1

He applied to Public Allies, was accepted, and participated in weekly leadership training at Public Allies while serving full-time at Legal Action Wisconsin. He discovered that he had a passion for people with disabilities, and over the next decade he grew his impact, helping lead a coalition of disability rights groups and eventually leading the Milwaukee chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. There he turned around a financially struggling agency and, through collaborations, expanded its services to the underserved African American and Latino communities that had previously been neglected.

Bizunesh Talbot-Scott

When Bizunesh Talbot-Scott applied to Public Allies, she was an eighteen-year-old single mom with a two-year-old son and was studying at Milwaukee Area Technical College. As an Ally, she worked for the Youth Leadership Academy, providing academic support and life skills to young African American boys.

Biz was young and immature, but she was also vivacious, ambitious, and smart. She gained focus through the program: “I was a smart girl who had no idea of my potential before Public Allies.”2

After her term was finished, she enrolled at Marquette University, where she excelled, and then at the University of Michigan Law School, where she was elected to the law review. After graduating, Biz moved to Washington, D.C., where she clerked for a federal judge and worked at the prestigious Skadden Arps and Patton Boggs law firms.

One day, a representative from Skadden Arps called Public Allies to make a donation on behalf of one of its associates. That associate was Biz, who was being honored because of her volunteer work in her community, especially at the Legal Aid Society in D.C. Later, during the transition to the Obama administration, Biz was appointed by the National Bar Association to chair the initiative to increase the number of African American attorneys serving in government, and she led a similar project for the National Congress of Black Women. She is now one of the staff leading presidential personnel at the White House.

Frank Alvarez

Frank Alvarez is busy. He directs a YouthBuild Program in Los Angeles that creates opportunities for youth who have left school without a diploma, have been incarcerated, or are otherwise disconnected from education and work. YouthBuild participants learn job and leadership skills while building affordable housing in their communities. Frank has also maintained a 3.7 grade-point average at Los Angeles Trade and Technical College, majoring in community planning and economic development while raising his daughter.

Frank describes his own path to this place: “In my family, education was never emphasized. My male relatives graduated from juvenile hall to county jail and then on to state prison. I was following the same path.”3

Frank had been involved in a gang and had served time in county jail. But he took a positive turn after getting out. He participated in YouthBuild, where he earned his GED, and then moved on to Public Allies, where he served at LA Works, a community-development organization, while further developing his leadership and a career path.

“I was able to attend classes at LA Trade Tech through Public Allies, which sparked my interest in education,” he says. “Here I was, a twenty-three-year old without a high school diploma, and I had fellow Allies with degrees from UCLA, USC, and other schools. I learned from them and gained confidence that I could do this, too. I am proud to be creating opportunities for young people like me to get on the path to leadership and success in our community. I'm able to make amends for damages I caused as a gang member.”

Most people don't look at the guy behind the sandwich counter, the single mom attending community college, or the former gang member and see future leaders. We do. Public Allies has developed more than 3,800 leaders like Peter, Bizunesh, and Frank over the past nineteen years. To us, it is tragic that communities and the organizations that serve them miss so much needed talent. Yet this is where most of the talent we need to solve problems resides.

When we look at many great American leaders, entrepreneurs, and organizers of social movements, we often find young people, women, and people from humble or unpromising origins. But many today who are concerned about social problems don't look in communities for leaders. Instead they look outside for heroic leaders who offer impressive, silver-bullet solutions. The press often features fawning articles about celebrities, young Ivy League graduates, or prominent business leaders who have exciting new ideas or projects that will solve our problems. For example, pundits like David Gergen and David Brooks have written glowingly about the number of young Ivy League graduates with “résumé bling” who want to start organizations to address such social challenges as education, health, poverty, and the environment.4 Such people are admirable and needed, but the media's emphasis on elite and celebrity leaders ignores the vast number of social entrepreneurs who for years have been building innovative nonprofit organizations and community solutions all across the country. A few leaders are celebrated because of their résumés, their media savvy, or their access to wealthy and politically powerful networks, and the many who have been innovating in communities for years are ignored. This kind of attention to celebrities and other elite leaders can actually discourage grassroots leaders, who don't have “résumé bling,” from stepping up.

The irony of focusing on young people from elite backgrounds is that when we study the history of social movements, or even the history of Fortune 500 companies, we rarely see founders and leaders who came from elite backgrounds. In fact, Northwestern Mutual Life researched five thousand entrepreneurs and created a questionnaire to determine a respondent's EQ, or entrepreneurship quotient. A respondent's EQ was significantly discounted if he or she had been an academic achiever, participated in group activities at school, or followed the opinions of authority figures. The questionnaire found that those who excelled more as entrepreneurs and leaders had developed street smarts, persuasiveness, humor, and creativity.5

Public Allies believes that everyone can lead. In saying this, we mean that everyone can step up and take responsibility for influencing and working with others for common goals that benefit our communities or the larger society. Leadership is not exclusively the domain of CEOs, elected officials, charismatic organizers, or celebrities. It is the domain of citizens. Our democracy is predicated on all of us stepping up to lead where we see public problems or needs.

By the term citizen I mean a member of a community, not a legal status. My use of the term citizen throughout the book is inclusive. It refers to any person who is committed to participating in making our communities better, regardless of that person's legal status—and there are many people who are not citizens in the legal sense but who do fit this picture of civic participation. One of my favorite definitions of the term citizen comes from Peter Block, who writes that a citizen is “one who is willing to be accountable to the well-being of the whole.”6

At Public Allies, we see the development of leaders as intertwined with the development of communities. If we want to strengthen our communities and solve problems, we need more leaders to come from our communities and be partners with our communities. In our increasingly diverse society, leaders must also look more like America and be connected to the communities they serve. To create lasting solutions to our most pressing problems, leaders can't just create isolated services. They must build community capacity, think systemically, and collaborate with others. We define the term community capacity as a combination of three elements:

1. The leadership and engagement of residents

2. The services and support that neighbors provide to neighbors

3. Coordination and collaboration toward common goals among the citizens, associations, nonprofits, schools, houses of worship, and businesses in a neighborhood

Leaders who can build community capacity often enact the five core practices that form the heart of this book. They recognize and mobilize all of a community's assets, they connect across cultures, they facilitate collaborative action, they continuously learn and improve, and they are accountable to those they work with and those they serve. These are the values that animate Public Allies' definition of leadership and influence how we carry out our mission. They are values that everyone can put into practice.

Our Mission: Changing the Face and Practice of Leadership

The mission of Public Allies is to advance new leadership to strengthen communities, nonprofits, and civic participation. We aim to change both the face and the practice of leadership by bringing new people to the proverbial tables of influence, and by changing the tables themselves. When we change who is sitting at the table, we also change the conversation, the process, and the results. This is how inclusion and collaboration work—it is about all of us working together as co-creators, not inviting others to help us do our work. We believe that, as a key element of solving community problems, leaders in today's communities need the ability to build community capacity. That is why we work on two fronts: we develop a new generation of diverse leaders (that is, we change the face of leadership), and we help them develop the practices they need to build community capacity and solve public problems effectively and sustainably (that is, we change the practice of leadership).

Changing the Face of Leadership

There is tremendous untapped potential for change in our communities. But most policy makers, nonprofit leaders, and community leaders fail to harness the energy, talents, and ideas of our diverse communities, especially among the people who live closest to the challenges.

Although many nonprofit organizations exist to engage citizens in solving problems, such organizations often aren't great at engaging new leadership in communities or within the organizations themselves. Research shows that nonprofit organizations do a poor job of recruiting and retaining diverse talent and often have very limited resources to invest in their people. Moreover, research at New York University and elsewhere has found a corresponding challenge in that very few young people know about careers in nonprofit and public service.7 It is stunning that organizations that exist to bring Americans together to solve public problems struggle with diversity at the leadership level. Several studies have found that between 80 percent and 90 percent of nonprofit organizations are led by Caucasians, and one study reported that younger CEOs are no more diverse than their older colleagues.8 And there is a glass ceiling in the nonprofit sector—women, who dominate the sector's workforce, are rare among CEOs of the largest nonprofit organizations and are paid less at all levels than their male colleagues.9 The groups that should be ameliorating these widespread disparities and engaging citizens of all backgrounds are instead exacerbating them! If nonprofits did a better job of building leadership in our increasingly diverse society, they could address the diversity gap in their own ranks.

In the so-called Millennials, we have a new generation whose members have a strong interest in community service (research shows that they have volunteered more than previous generations), embrace diversity (this is the most diverse generation to date), and prefer to work in teams.10 Those who seek to engage this generation by looking only at people with the best educational credentials miss a huge number of potential leaders. For example, the fact that only about 30 percent of adults are college graduates means that the practice of looking for new leaders on college campuses excludes a great number of young people.11 (And, naturally, the practice of looking for young leaders only on the campuses of elite schools excludes an even greater number of potential leaders and leaves us with a pool made up of less than 5 percent of young people, limiting the kinds of talent, creativity, experience, and skills that leaders have.) In our urban communities, only about half of the young people comp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Logo
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: About Public Allies and the Concept that Everyone Leads
• Part Two: The Five Core Public Allies Leadership Values
• Afterword
• Notes
• The Author
• Public Allies
• Index