Community Corner

Transformational Leadership Summit Gets Underway

Participants leave the first day of the summit energized and inspired

The Transformational Leadership Summit kicked off yesterday at Restoration Plaza to a full house.

Herma Schmitz led the workshop's premier day by introducing the topic of language and its power to either divide and destroy or unite and create.

Rachel Joseph, operations manager at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation said her biggest takeaway this first day was understanding fully how what you say and how you say it can affect your life, your family and your community.

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"So far, I've learned to be more fully expressed; to give myself permission to really express myself."

Betty Staton, acting project director of the Bedford Stuyvesant Community Legal Services Corporation, said, "Today has been wonderful, enlightening, motivating, really. It's creating a new awareness in me as far as what I should do with self."

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Schmitz took participants through an exercise by asking them to list the their complaints about the community and the things that are happening now in the community that they'd like to see changed. Participants listed everything from young men wearing their pants below their butts, to violent crime, from a lack of basic services, to littering to gentrification.

She then asked them to delve deeper and "get behind the smoke screen," to the heart of their complaints. What seemed an innocuous and easy exercise began to uncover some uncomfortable truths about what it really was they were seeking through their complaints.

"It's only the first day, so I'm looking forward to the rest of the week when the program's ideas come to full fruition," Staton said. "But even the very first day has just excited me about the possibility of transforming myself, so that I can better work to transform my organization and then effectively collaborate to transform my community."


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