Leadership in Community Engagement
Selections have been made for Fall 2011. Please consider applying for Fall 2012. Applications will be available Spring 2012.
Course Description:
This two credit course is an exploration of characteristics that make for an effective leader in community engagement. This class is broken into four sections: The Individual in Society/Leadership, The Non-Profit, Social Responsibility and Evaluation of the Individual Role in Leading in Society.
This class will expose students to a variety of non-profit organizations and different approaches to leading a non-profit. Through lectures, discussions, debates, readings and writing assignments students will develop a deeper perspective from which to interpret, question, reflect upon, and engage with the underlying issues within engaged community leadership. It is also an opportunity to listen to, learn from and critique leaders in community engagement.
Specific course objectives include:1. Examination of the characteristics of community leaders.
2. To nurture and promote the art of dialogue (written and oral) inside the classroom.
3. Increase ability to analyze a problem from multiple perspectives and make an argument.
4. Demonstrate (in writing and through oral presentation) the scholarly and learning intentions
associated with a community based learning partnership.
TUESDAYS - Fall 2011 Schedule - 4:30-6:30 pm
August 31 Retreat!
September 6 Ten Commitments of Leadership
September 13 Robert Egger, Founder of DC Central Kitchen
Robert Egger is the Founder and President of the DC Central Kitchen, the country’s first “community kitchen”, where food donated by hospitality businesses and farms is used to fuel a nationally recognized culinary arts job training program, where unemployed men and women learn marketable skills while donations are converted into balanced meals.In Washington, Robert was the founding Chair of both the Mayor’s Commission on Nutrition and Street Sense, He was also the Co-Convener of the first Nonprofit Congress, held in Washington DC in 2006.Robert wrote a book in 2004 called Begging for Change and one year later it received the 2005 McAdam Prize for “Best Nonprofit Management Book”. Robert was included in the Non Profit Times list of the “50 Most Powerful and Influential” nonprofit leaders from 2006-2009. He was the recipient of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington’s 2007 “Lifetime Achievement” award and the 2004 James Beard Foundation “Humanitarian of the Year” award. He has been named an Oprah Angel, a Washingtonian of the Year, a Point of Light and one of the Ten Most Caring People in America, by the Caring Institute. He is also a 14-gallon blood donor to the American Red Cross.
Robert speaks throughout the country and internationally on the subjects of hunger, sustainability, nonprofit political engagement and social enterprise. He writes blogs and editorials to share his ideas about the nonprofit sector and the future of America. For more about the DC Central Kitchen check out: www.dccentralkitchen.org/.
September 20 Doug Bunch, Chairman of Global Playground
Doug Bunch Mr. Bunch is actively involved in several nonprofit endeavors and currently works as an Associate at the Firm Cohen Milstein. He serves as Founder and Chairman of Global Playground, Inc., an organization which promotes education in developing countries; as Executive Director of Ascanius: The Youth Classics Institute, which promotes the study of classics in the elementary school; and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, which promotes the study of world languages more broadly.
Mr. Bunch is a graduate of the William & Mary School of Law (2006), where he was a recipient of the Benjamin Rush Medal. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, he graduated summa cum laude from the College of William & Mary in 2002 with a Bachelor’s degree in Government and Classical Studies. Mr. Bunch is also a 2003 graduate of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, from which he holds a Master's degree in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy. At Harvard, he served as an intern in the Boston office of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, where he worked closely with attorneys to enforce federal laws that protect students from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, and disability.
Mr. Bunch is admitted to practice in New York, the District of Columbia, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the U.S. District Courts for the District of Columbia, District of Colorado, and Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. Mr. Bunch works in the Firm’s Washington D.C. office. For more about Global Playgrounds check out: http://theglobalplayground.org/.
September 27 Jill Piachelli, Director of Break Away
Jill Piacitelli has worked with Break Away in various capacities for the last 10 years: conference and retreat facilitator, National Program Director, curriculum development, Board of Directors, and Programs Board. She received a bachelor’s of science in Sociology from Brigham Young University, where her stint as a research assistant fueled her interest in service-learning and in social movements. She went on to become a service-learning coordinator on several campuses, able to be part of 5 alternative breaks. She is committed to the development of active citizenship, and the role a quality alternative break can play in a life .http://www.alternativebreaks.org/leaders.asp
October 4 George Srour, Founder of Building Tomorrow
George Srour developed the idea that evolved into Building Tomorrow as a student at The College of William and Mary. In just six weeks, he helped raise $45,000 to construct a three-story school in Kampala, Uganda, which now serves 350 children. George, a 2005 college graduate, credits his experience working for the United Nations World Food Programme for inspiring him to launch Building Tomorrow.
In the summer of 2004,George Srour interned at the United Nations World Food Programme Headquarters in Rome, Italy and then at a regional office in Kampala, Uganda. Part of his assignment was to study the structure of the school feeding initiative, a program designed to help lure kids into the classrooms and off the streets in developing countries such as Uganda.
While touring close to twenty schools in Kampala, Srour visited several sites benefiting from this program. One in particular, Meeting Point Kampala (MPK), was home to nearly 1,000 students and was holding classes in a poorly constructed timber building. The school's director indicated that while the school was in great need, the $10,000 price tag of a new structure was too prohibitive.
This figure in mind, Srour returned to The College of William & Mary and enlisted the help of several classmates, administrators and community members in a project called Christmas in Kampala. Several organizations helped to arrange fundraising activities that in just over six weeks yielded $45,000. On Christmas Day, a contingent of William & Mary students made a surprise delivery to the children of MPK with a holiday dinner and gifts for all, as well as enough money to build a new schoolhouse.
As a recipient of the inaugural William E. Simon Fellowship for Noble Purpose, Srour has been working to replicate the model of Christmas in Kampala at other colleges and universities across the country under the name Building Tomorrow. http://www.buildingtomorrow.org/zeta/
October 11 Fall Break
October 18 Brian Chiglinsky, Health Insurance Specialist at U.S Department of Heath and
Human Services
Brian graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2008 and is currently working as a Health Insurance Specialist at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Since graduation, Brian has worked as a Specialist for Community Relations and Services at Office of Mayor Adrian Fenty, for Spring Vol at The White House, as a Senior Special Assistant to the Secretary of Technology at The Office of Governor Tim Kaine and a Special Assistant for Constituent Services at The Office of Governor Tim Kaine.
October 25 David B. Smith, Executive Director the National Conference on Citizenship
David B. Smith is the Executive Director of the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC). Prior to joining NCoC, David founded and directed Mobilize.org, a national organization that improves democracy by investing in Millennial led solutions. Under his tenure, Mobilize.org expanded from a team of 10 students to over 30,000 activists in over 200 communities and published the acclaimed Mobilizer's Guidebook and Democracy 2.0 Declaration.
David currently serves as the co-founder and Vice Chair of the Youth Policy Action Center (YPAC), an award winning website that serves as a central hub for legislative action alerts pertaining to youth issues for over 100 national organizations and 30,000 online advocates.
David has been honored with awards including the Independent Sector’s “American Express NGen Fellowship”, YouthVote Coalition’s “30 under 30” and the International Youth Foundation’s “YouthActionNet Fellowship” for social entrepreneurship. He has been featured in books including the Millennial Manifesto and Generation We, and has published an essay in Rebooting America.
David serves as Chairman of Mobilize.org, Treasurer for Prepare the Future, Director of Common Sense California, and Trustee of Americans for Generational Equity. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Splashlife, and on the Steering Committee of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools.
David graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor's degree in Political Science. While at Cal, he taught a class on National Youth Policy and researched the causes and possible solutions to the “Youth Civic Engagement Crisis in America.” www.ncoc.net
November 1 Cosmo Fujiyama - Founder of Students Helping Honduras
Cosmo Fujiyama is passionate about cultivating the growth of informed, confident leaders capable of leading social change in their communities. She currently works for Ashoka’s search team as an intrapreneur for the global office in Arlington, Virginia, where she is focused on developing strategies for talent recruitment and organizational design. At Ashoka, Cosmo designed and led programs for emerging youth social entrepreneurs to connect, innovate and collaborate with one another to build awareness of social entrepreneurship.
Prior to joining Ashoka, Cosmo Fujiyama served as President of Students Helping Honduras (SHH), a non-profit organization dedicated to building a movement of youth across the US and Honduras to combat extreme poverty. She co-founded SHH when she was a sophomore in college after recognizing a gap and an opportunity to promote civic engagement among university students. By organizing fellow students through grassroots efforts, Cosmo engaged hundreds of students on her campus and raised over $148,000 in the first 12 weeks of operation. After finishing her Bachlors degree in American Studies and Womans Studies at the College of William and Mary, Cosmo received a generous start-up grant from Doris Buffett of the Sunshine Lady Foundation and relocated to Honduras to build her nonprofit on a fulltime basis. For three and a half years, she designed and developed projects that, through local and global partnerships, generated human and financial capital to build necessary infrastructure for community development. In addition to helping communities pursue opportunities and create chance, Cosmo met and led over 1,300 college students in service learning opportunities in Honduras to transform how youth engagement in issues of development.
Cosmo will join the NYU Wagner School of Public Service in the fall to broaden her perspective on the intersection of policy, strategic and financial management and social innovation. Additionally, Cosmo will focus on expanding her model for youth entrepreneurship and training the next generation of aspiring leaders to launch and scale sustainable social enterprises. http://www.studentshelpinghonduras.org/
November 8
November 15 Next Steps and Final Gathering -- no speaker
