The Leadership Institute, as a service-learning program, is designed for 20 teens and is conducted across an 80-hour, four-week period that runs through July and August 2020. Small groups of teens work with professionals in Focus Groups learning and applying real world research and analysis and planning skills to a collaboratively agreed upon focus, which is a justice concern of interest to the group of teens and appropriate to the profession represented by the Focus Group Facilitator. Integrated into the experience is the learning and improving of work readiness skills, leadership and collaboration skills, skills of planning and implementing and evaluating an action plan and its outcomes, as well as learning the history related to local historic Underground Railroad activists and their relationship with us today, and learning how to be civically responsible members of the community.

Each teen Focus Group is expected to produce a Legacy Project, left behind for others to be educated and enriched, which exhibits what the teens have learned, and which invites others to engage with in some interactive fashion. Enrichment modules are integrated into the program which focus on college preparedness, financial literacy, entrepreneurship and healthy lifestyle choices.

Informing the Leadership Institute design and experience is the work of Howard Gardner who is an American developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University and who is credited with formulation of the Theory of Multiple intelligences. Gardner states, “We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts and cultivate these. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.”  (2016)

COVID safety protocols are practiced daily so as to keep everyone safe.