How I Got Involved
In the 2018 graduating class of College Leadership Rhode Island there were no graduates of this state wide college leadership program that were studying any aspect of working with children. In many other years there were very few people who were aspiring to be leaders in the education sector. I decided that it was time to change that, if they say this program is where community leaders are risen out of, someone should be representing the future of our world… the children. I applied for the program in May, had an interview in July, and received noticed I would be accepted into the class at the end of September. Later after being accepted it was released that I was the only member of the program that had the strength of Intelluction in the cohort. I am there basically for my way I interpret data and make plans to change what is going on in our world.
During our first session we played games to team build, analyzed our strengths, and talked to the founder of Waterfire about the community of PVD. We started at 8am and ended at 7pm including the after party. One of the games we played was like an escape room. They had us partnered in groups based on our results from the Gallup Strengthsfinder Assessment. We then all solved the puzzle that was suppose to take one hour in less than 20 minutes. We then talked in small groups and as a whole group about why this activity went so quick for us, and so long for groups full of executives. We decided as a group it was because not everyone was trying to be the leader of the group, and that we were all leaders of the problem, but we all knew our areas we were good at. This to me modeled the factor of leading with. We learned to lead with one another except overpowering one another and we succeeded quickly. One of our sessions was with the founder of Waterfire we talked about how WaterFire became a model for other cities around the world and how its art takes on cultural meanings and makes spaces for young people to creatively present their culture to the city with their platform. We then participated in telling our stories to one another about why we were present there. Person after person got up and spoke about our stories and we laughed and cried together for hours. We finished the day with a lecture from 2 professors about Strength Finding and how to use people’s strengths to build a working team.
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