Molly Gard
My Impact & Leadership Lessons
Impact Overview
During this first academic year of SOAR through Leadership, we have made a lot of progress as an organization and have truly created an impact on many involved. In Fall 2023, 6 students were selected to join SOAR. In Spring 2024, the total member count increased to 17. Each SOAR member was an active part of the initiative, with each member committed to one of our Squads that focused on different areas of SOAR operations. Throughout the whole academic year, our members committed to 10 hours worth of official SOAR meetings, 11 hours worth of working with youth, and 20+ hours in research and activity development. We held a total of 6 activities with the youth at Lafayette Mentors, with each activity being different and uniquely showcasing important leadership skills, and we also hosted a leadership activity with the youth participating in College Mentors for Kids. At Lafayette Mentors, we worked with 15 youth, and with College Mentors for Kids, we worked with roughly 30 youth. SOAR through Leadership hopes to continue developing our relationships with our current community partners and consistently providing new, enriching activities for the youth we work with.
Impact Story
When I think of my past year working on this wonderful social impact initiative, my fondest memory has to be of the first activity we held with the youth at Lafayette Mentors towards the end of the Fall 2023 semester. We developed a gingerbread building activity in which the youth created mini-gingerbread fortresses in teams, with a SOAR volunteer working with each group. I worked with a group of a few boys, and I had a great time building the gingerbread fortress with them. I was very impressed with their creativity when coming up with ideas to build the fortress, and I was even more impressed at their resilience and teamwork whenever their ideas didn’t succeed. Building a structure with gingerbread and icing is not an easy feat, but whenever the structure fell down on us, the boys refused to get frustrated and continued to have fun. To be fair, I never was the best myself at building gingerbread houses. Out of hilarious creativity, the boys decided to make the best of our falling structure by creatively covering it in a rainbow of different icing colors to still make it look nice. My co-founder, Anushka, decided to create a reward for our team titled “Buddy’s Breakfast” in reference to the movie Elf. Only some of the kids knew the reference, but the SOAR members found it fun nonetheless. Then, after giving out candy to all the youth as a reward, they got to take apart the gingerbread structures to take home pieces to snack on. Even though my group didn’t have the most “polished” structure, I was so proud of them for exhibiting such great positivity, creativity, resilience, and teamwork. I like to think of this gingerbread structure as a representation of life, in a sense. Sometimes, things go wrong, and it feels like life may be crashing down on you. Nonetheless, it is important to keep holding on to what you have (like the way the boys held up the walls of the falling structure). And yet, even in all the chaos, you can make something beautiful and overcome it all.
First Leadership Lesson
For this first leadership lesson, I focused on the overarching theme of the best practices for teaching youth leadership skills. This is an important theme for my social impact work as SOAR through Leadership strives to effectively teach youth important leadership skills. We have worked to create a solid curriculum of concepts for them to learn, but it will also be important to ensure they are able to engage with and retain each competency in order to have a true impact. Within this theme, the primary question I asked myself is the following: How do we properly view the youth in order to best serve them?
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One of the scholarly resources I found on this subject is the article Youth Development & Youth Leadership by Edelman et al. (2004). This article goes into depth about important aspects to consider in youth development & youth leadership programs, including a model of different youth programs and the amount of leadership youth have in each program type (Edelman et al., pg. 15). The first type is the “For Youth” Program, in which programs are run and driven by adults, and although youth are the participating party of these programs, their opinions and input are not asked for or taken into account. The second type is the “With Youth” Program, in which youths’ voices are sought out, yet leadership positions and overall power is still given to adults. The final type is the “Youth-Driven” Program, in which youths’ input is prioritized and has such a strong output that it overrides the force of the adults that may or may not be running the program. The article describes the Youth-Driven Program as the most impactful as it provides participating youth the most opportunities to become empowered leaders and to learn how to best change the systems that work for them (pg. 16). This concept of the Youth-Driven Program provides an eye-opening perspective on how we can view the youth we work with and how we interact with them in our work. In fact, the impact team of SOAR has been conversing about this very topic of what level of leadership and voice the youth we work with should hold. One aspect that has made us more wary about allowing them too much freedom within the programming is the (possibly false) idea that they are too young to be able to properly handle true organizational leadership. However, the reading specifically pointed out the feeling of risk that the Youth-Driven Program model creates, describing, “...adults may go along with something that they are not sure would work because the young people make a strong enough case to justify the risk” (pg. 15). From this insight from the article, it may be worth the risk to try to give our youth some more input within our programming, whether it be giving them the opportunity to come up with future activity ideas (with us still providing a baseline to allow for it to remain connected to our curriculum) or perhaps giving some of the older kids assisting roles in our activities in which they can help lead the younger ones. Although it will be a long process to find the right balance of leadership for the youth we work with, especially considering how we will need to find that new balance with the youth from each each new community partner, it will be worth it in the end in order to find the way to best empower the youth we work with.
A second article I found on this subject is Maximizing Youth Leadership in Out-of-School Time Programs: Six Best Practices from Youth Driven Spaces by Wu et al. (2022). This article provides insight on some best practices for youth-adult partnership programs in order to increase youth engagement. One of the points that the text highlighted is the importance of involving youth in meeting preparation and facilitation (pg. 77). An idea that they pointed out was that “Another effective way to engage youth, employed in all meetings we observed, was to implement a brief reflection time at the end of the meeting. Summarizing the discussion, considering future activities, and processing how the meeting went helped youth feel their time was wisely spent” (pg. 16). From the ideas gathered from this reading, it is suggested that we view the youth in a way that allows us to provide them opportunities to deeply reflect on the lessons they have engaged with. We can apply this strategy by adding a reflection time at the end of our activities with youth, providing them the space to comment on how they liked the activity and what they would change. This debrief time can also be used as a vital part of the lesson plan for teaching youth relevant curricular concepts by having a guided conversation with them about their experiences in the activity, talking about how the activity connects to real-world leadership, and providing them the space to reflect on how these skills can be applied in the future.
There have been a great amount of experiences I have had through SOAR through Leadership in which I gained a greater understanding of the best practices of teaching youth leadership skills. One of the most memorable experiences was the first time I met the youth at Lafayette Mentors. Before visiting the youth there for the first time, I acknowledged my preconceptions about youth of their demographic – middle school boys. When I think of that general category of youth, I tend to think of rather over-energetic kids that prioritize video games and playing sports over listening to insight given by adults. Of course, I understood that this was not the case for all kids of that demographic, but I held the misconception that these kids may have more behavioral issues or care less for our activities due to their age and gender. However, upon meeting them for the first time, I was astonished at their maturity and respect. Of course, they still loved physical activities as well as video games (which isn’t a bad thing by any means). Nevertheless, I got to experience how these youth acted towards each other and towards their adult leader, Ms. Robin, with respect and general kindness. Since these kids were able to successfully exceed all of my expectations, I realized how important it will be to eliminate all preconceptions of the youth we’re working with in order to allow everyone we work with to feel as though they’re being acknowledged and listened to. Those working with youth should start out with a blank slate in their mind when viewing them, preventing any biases from coming through and impeding on their ability to effectively work with youth. I believe that this will also increase engagement in our leadership activities as they will feel a greater connection to those running the activity if we make sure they feel heard. It will also be important to view youth with an asset mindset, understanding their positive aspects and praising those, rather than a deficit mindset and viewing those we work with simply through their needs or areas of needed improvement. In order to encourage youth to grow in leadership skills, it will be important that they feel confident in their strengths that they currently hold, and encouraging an asset mindset when interacting with youth may better encourage this confidence.
Second Leadership Lesson
For my second leadership lesson, I focused on the theme of how multiple leaders come together to make effective change as a collaborative group. I find this theme important because understanding the dynamics between different leadership positions within an organization can allow those involved to feel more confident in their established role and provide them a guideline of what aspects of leadership are needed in the development of an initiative and when. The primary questions I asked myself from this general theme are the following: What types of leadership roles are commonly seen in organizations and social impact initiatives? Is there a demand for certain leadership styles depending on the developmental stage of the organization?
One important piece of literature I found on this subject is Key Roles of the Leadership Landscape by Sheard and Kakabadse (2002). This article delves into a model that describes four main leadership roles that exist within an organization’s team: the legitimate leader (responsible for the completion of “core” tasks), the social leader (responsible for ensuring connectivity between team members), the task leader (leads groups carrying out tasks given by legitimate leader), and the macro leader (experienced leader that creates profound impacts through more brief interactions) (pgs. 130-131). It also introduces a framework of the processes in which every newly founded organization goes through (Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing [pg. 130]), and through empirical research discovered how these different leadership roles are employed at each stage and their effectiveness. It was found that all four of the leadership roles were found to be important during at least one of the four stages. In terms of leadership in teams, this article provides a lot of organizational strategies that can be applied in many settings. Some conclusions I came to from this article were the importance of the delegation of these key leadership roles and the need for strategic implementation of each leadership style depending on the developmental stage of the organization. It will be necessary when working as a team of leaders in an organization to delegate each leadership role to those who best match each style. Then, in the ways in which the article describes, these leaders will be highlighted at different amounts depending on the developmental stage of the organization. These strategies may promote deeper connections within the team, increased passion for the project, and overall efficiency and longevity of the organization.
Another article I found on this theme is Leadership in Teams: A Functional Approach to Understanding Leadership Structures and Processes by Morgeson et al. (2009). This article creates a description of important team leadership functions that help develop and sustain a team and then determines the types of team leaders (internal/external, formal/informal) that are best fit to implement each function. It also proposes a framework in which teams cycle between transition and action phases, with transition phrases requiring leadership tasks relating to organizing and planning future action and team roles and action phases requiring leadership roles that fall under the purpose of taking actions that will work towards accomplishing team goals. I found this article to be very relevant in this leadership theme as it provides a different scope on determining different leadership roles within a team based on whether the organization is within an action or transition phase. This article also takes the perspective that organizational leadership has a dynamic style depending on the stage of the organization. It is interesting to, in comparison to the other article by Sheard & Kakabadse (2002), view the necessary leadership in an organization in terms of leadership functions rather than structured roles. This could provide more flexibility in leadership task delegation as more or less leaders can perform these functions based on the needs of the organization. I do believe that both articles have their merit for team leadership and perhaps a model that encapsulates the ideas from both would be valuable to take into consideration.
One experience I’ve had through SOAR through Leadership that has better informed me on the ways different leaders come together in a team setting is transitioning our leadership structure between our first and second semester of this past academic year. During my first semester as one of two executive directors for SOAR through Leadership, I was placed into being primarily responsible for the creation of our youth leadership curriculum and held the secondary, shared task of leading our volunteers at meetings to develop our future event plans. Meanwhile, the other executive director held the primary role of leading our promotional development and outreach. However, as I’ve transitioned into next semester, in which we started our leadership activities with youth, my role has started to change in that I’ve had to work more with the development of each activity based on our curriculum and sharing the tasks of logistical work, such as leading meetings and carrying out/preparing for visits. The other executive director now focuses more on activity preparation and outreach, along with that shared role. An interesting change this semester as well was the creation of multiple Squadron Leaders that lead specific types of tasks vital to SOAR’s development, such as media and outreach, events and logistics, and treasury. It is interesting to view this experience from the scope of the ideas shown in the aforementioned literature. We can see this first semester of the development of SOAR as a transition state and the second semester as an action state. As our initiative has moved from our transition state of setting up everything, we’ve started to delve into an action state in which more action-oriented leadership tasks are expected from the leaders of SOAR. I have also learned how to give more power to those in co-existing leadership roles, specifically the Task leadership role, as we’ve developed the Squadron Leader structure.