Leadership

Leadership Begins At The Bottom

September 26, 2020 Ron Kipling Williams. Educate! Activism, Baltimore, Grassroots, Leadership

Let’s be clear. A title does not make you a leader. Look at Capitol Hill. Leadership begins in your home. You are the executive, manager, administrator, foot soldier, all wrapped up in one. No President of the United States is responsible for a booming economy. The people are. People make businesses, employ people, produce products and services, and in turn support communities. This ripple effectuates the nation. The President is the ambassador of the nation, and is the moral and ethical leader therein. The true change makers are the boots on the ground that makes the nation work.

Five Elements Of Collective Leadership

February 8, 2018 Cassanda O'Neill and Monica Brinkerhoff, Nonprofitquarterly.org Organize! Collective, Leadership

We have defined collective leadership as a group of people working together toward a shared goal.1 When collective leadership is happening, people are internally and externally motivated—working together toward a shared vision within a group and using their unique talents and skills to contribute to the success. In fact, collective leadership recognizes that lasting success is not possible without diverse perspectives and contributions. Collective leadership is a process. It is dependent on the relationships among the parts in the system, whether that system is two people working together; a classroom, team, board, or organization; or a system initiative. In collective leadership, the way the group works together makes it different from a more traditional model of leadership.

Why I Interrupted The Netroots Presidential Town Hall

July 22, 2015 Tia Oso, www.mic.com Resist! #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Black Women, Elections, Leadership, Politics, Social Change

By Tia Oso in Mic - I am Tia Oso, the black woman who took to the stage and demanded a microphone on July 18 at the Netroots Nation Presidential Town Hall in Phoenix, Arizona. I did this to focus the attention of the nation's largest gathering of progressive leaders and presidential hopefuls on the death of Sandra Bland and other black women killed while in police custody, because the most important and urgent issue of our day is structural violence and systemic racism that is oppressing and killing black women, men and children. This is an emergency. Sandra Bland and I had a lot in common. We were both black women, active in our communities and the Movement for Black Lives. We both pledged sororities: I'm a Delta, Bland was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho. I have also been harshly confronted by police during "routine" traffic stops and feared for my safety and my life.

Shattering The Myth Of The Leaderless Movement

June 17, 2015 Barbara Ransby, www.colorlines.com Educate! History, Leadership, Racial Justice, Revolution, Twitter

By Barbara Ransby in Color Lines - Who gets to tell the story? This is a question implicit in the work I do as a historian. But the question I have been wrestling with lately is more immediate: Who gets to shape the narrative, define the history-makers, and capture the words and images of the current black-led, anti-state violence movement evolving in the United States right now? Even the act of naming a movement like this has its power. Last month The New York Times Magazine bestowed part of the defining privilege on a young former sports writer, Jay Caspian Kang. Kang reduced the growing movement to the personal story lines of two young, earnest and committed social media activists, DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta "Netta" Elzie. While their work has made a critical contribution, Kang frames that work in a way that misrepresents the larger movement.

The Real Experts In Criminal Justice Reform

May 26, 2015 Glenn E. Martin, www.nccdglobal.org Create! Criminal Justice, Law, Leadership, Mass Incarceration, Poverty, Social Change

I was first bound by handcuffs in 1995, and though I haven’t known their debilitating grip for years, the hypocrisy and destructiveness of our criminal justice system has remained with me ever since. When exiting the belly of the beast, my vision was crystal clear, even if my path was uncertain. Throughout my adolescence, strife was a familiar companion: poverty, crime, meager public support, and violence predictably culminated in a term of incarceration. After leaving prison, like the other 650,000 people who exit each year, I faced barriers to employment, enfranchisement, education, and equality, both mirroring and intensifying the challenges of my youth. I found opportunity in the advocacy world. There, I was valued for my professional skills, but also for the unique perspective that I brought to the work as someone directly impacted. I began to gain national attention as a staunch advocate for reform.

Oprah & Sharpton Attack Black Lives Matter Movement

February 6, 2015 Glen Ford, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Leadership, Racial Justice

Al Sharpton and Oprah Winfrey are scared witless that the Black Lives Matter mobilization will become a sustained, independent political movement – one that challenges both the rich white rulers and their junior partners in the Black Misleadership Class. The viciousness of Winfrey’s and Sharpton’s assaults on the new crop of organizers is a good barometer of the nascent movement’s effectiveness, to date, in discomforting the comfortable. If one thing is clear to African American youth, it is that so-called Black leadership has been complicit in the catastrophe that has engulfed their communities – that the “leaders” are part of the problem, not the solution. Therefore, although the movement-in-the-making is not yet large and coherent enough to shake the foundations of the State or cause Wall Street to shudder, it has already created a crisis of legitimacy for the Black Misleadership Class.

Getting Rid Of Al Sharpton & The Misleadership Class

December 19, 2014 Glen Ford, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Ferguson, Leadership, police brutality

Although many of the young activists may not have been aware that they were crossing a kind of Rubicon, the threat that “Ferguson” represented to the post-Sixties order was immediately evident to the Black misleaders that have colluded with the mass incarceration regime for the past two generations. It soon became obvious that the Al Sharptons of the community were attempting to isolate the core Ferguson activists and prevent the coalescing of a youth-led national Black movement – especially one that might act in concert with non-Blacks in the remnants of the anti-war and Occupy movements.

10 Leaders Who Redefine Leadership

December 17, 2013 Emily Garcia and Kim Crane, www.worldpulse.com Organize! Leadership

Think you know what a leader looks like? Meet nine women and one male ally from World Pulse’s global network who are transforming their communities—and challenging traditional images of leadership along the way. When we reached out to World Pulse community member Susan K.A. to thank her for her leadership as a World Pulse Welcomer and to ask her if she’d like to participate in this article, she was surprised. She had never before thought of herself as a leader, a word she’d seen divide people rather than bring them together. But her actions, along with the other nine women and men you will read about here, model loving and compassionate leadership.

Daily movement news and resources