Andy: Annabel, could you describe the Latino Leadership Academy, which you just finished?
Annabel: Sure. The Latino Leadership Academy has been around for some time now. They open an invitation to leaders who are already working in the community but maybe just need a bit more guidance. The Leadership Academy provides the cohort with lectures by guest speakers, a lot of reading, and space to build community as a group. We also work together on a project. All these help us polish our leadership and understand our development, especially the way we can come together and work together, encourage one another, open doors for one another. It’s also nice that it was spread out over eight monthly sessions. We would have intense days of learning, but then plenty of time to reflect on that and put it into practice, to absorb what we had learned.
One of the things I really appreciated about being in the Academy was being surrounded by people who speak my language and share my culture and who are already in leadership positions that I hadn’t known we occupied. It was nice to be with people I could identify with, and to be able to see myself in those spaces because people like me were already there.
Andy: And Andres, you’re one of the leaders who started the LLA?
Andres: Yes, I was one of the founding board members when we began the LLA in 2006. We’ve had cohorts of leaders almost every year since then. As Annabel mentioned, the target audience is mid-career professionals who are already doing well, who we can encourage to take a next step. Part of the idea is to demystify leadership and show that it’s not some innate trait that only some are born with but rather something you practice and work at.
It’s the Latino Leadership Alliance – obviously we view leadership through a Latino cultural lens. Every community has its own nuances and differences, and we wanted to make a space for Latino leaders.
Andy: You talked about “demystifying” leadership. So what’s the mystery, and what’s the answer that you’re trying to reveal?
Andres: Well, the old-school thought is that somehow somebody’s born with it. But research and case studies show that it’s a practice, that people who feel like they’re not natural leaders can turn out to be great leaders. One of the reasons we bring in guest speakers to the classes is to show that they’re human beings. They mess up. They have fun. And they do a lot of work. That hard effort is probably the one thing that connects all these leaders, so we want to bring that lesson back to the cohorts. And we want our students to shake hands and rub shoulders with leaders they might not otherwise get to meet.
Andy: You mentioned a joint project as part of the experience. Could you talk about that?
Annabel: Every cohort presents a project at the end of the LLA. We wrote a white paper – trying to rename it a brown paper! – researching leadership in the Latino community. When you look at the resources and examples around leadership, not much is drawn from Latinos. Even the reading assignments for our own program couldn’t come from Latino examples. So we wanted to produce something that would be a resource to younger generations looking for examples of Latino leadership. We wrote case studies in the education, government, and nonprofit sectors.
Andres: It was an excellent project – probably the best that we’ve had! Very professional, and entirely driven by the participants in the cohort.
Andy: That’s great! How do you see leadership at the street level, in your day-to-day lives?
Andres: I see leadership at all levels, from people managing budgets of millions of dollars to front-line managers making decisions for their teams. I teach at a community college, and one of the recent examples that was most meaningful to me was a tenured faculty member who stood up and advocated for those of us without that security when a horrible decision had been made against us. She put herself in the crosshairs of the administration when she would have been in no danger because she saw our need, and she changed the narrative.
Annabel: I see Joel, our volunteer coordinator for our food distribution program at church, as a leader. When the food bank told us they wouldn’t be able to provide goods for us anymore, he stepped up to commit to filling the gap. He ended up securing donations from another source which allows him to buy food for the community, and he’s able to choose more culturally attuned provisions than we were receiving before.
And I see leadership in the women of Bridge Communities, who show up to run their programs even when they don’t get a lot of participation from other neighbors. They are faithful and cheerful, in spite of obstacles. For a long time, I heard a narrative as a Latina woman that I couldn’t be a leader, and I’ve had to fight against that narrative. But I’m in a place now where I can call myself a leader and see that I’ve always been one. God made me a leader. He’s always seen me that way. And he’s put me in places to polish the rough edges of my leadership, like Servant Partners and the LLA. I’m still learning, but I can finally say that this is who I am. Not just who I want to become, but who I am.
Annabel Levya is part of the Servant Partners team in San Jose, California. Andres Quintero is an elected school board member in San Jose.