I am pleased to announce a $500 Cultivation Grant award to the Lena J. Campbell Academy in the Office of Gifted and Talented Education (Atlanta Public Schools) in Georgia.
The Transforming My Leadership Potential Compassion Project will involve 4th and 5th grade students (about 115) in planning the project. The additional students (about 185) at the Academy will participate in the project but just not assist in planning.
Nothing warms my heart more than seeing children have the opportunity to grow and practice their leadership.
Central to our Grants is a unique purpose and aim statement. This statement helps grantees connect what they learn with how to use it, but mostly importantly, answers WHY they do it. The why connects their personal passion and organization mission and turns it into difference making action.
I am pleased to share in their words highlights of their Application:
Campbell Academy Project Highlights
Unique Purpose and Aim (UPA) Statement:
The unique purpose and aim of Transforming My Leadership Potential Compassion Project is to foster a community where students and teachers promote compassion and practice empathy on a daily basis as a step toward taking a stand toward positive platform and initiating positive social change.
Project Abstract:
The focus of Transforming My Leadership Potential Compassion Project is on teaching students the benefits of exercising compassion in the community and world and allowing them to utilize this skill daily. As a result, the entire school community can experience these benefits first hand because of an atmosphere that rewards and encourages the use of empathy.
The project also involves allowing students to connect as leaders with other student leaders and connect with adult leaders in the community through an empowering leadership summit.
How will this empower and strengthen your mission?
Campbell Academy’s theme for the 2011-2012 school year is Great Minds Leading the Way: A Path to Transformation. By encouraging a positive leadership environment where students are expected to be compassionate toward their fellow peers and where teachers are expected to do the same, not only will students be transformed, but also the environment of the organization will be more positive and function better as one cohesive unit.
The empowering acts of compassion toward fellow peers, young and old will have a contagious effect and could potentially spread throughout the school district. Moreover, the transition from elementary school to middle school may be positively impacted if more students develop and practice the leader friendly gardening practice of empathy.
Project Plan:
The goal of Transforming My Leadership Potential Compassion Project is to provide resources and incentives for the gifted education students at a cluster school to learn about and engage in the leader-friendly gardening practice of empathy on a daily basis.
Additionally, the goal is to have student leaders and community leaders participate in an engaging leadership summit at the school where they will interact on various levels. Students will showcase their own leadership skills and activities surrounding their own leadership practices that affect their communities.
The target audience for the project is a group of approximately 300 identified gifted and talented students being served weekly at Campbell Academy, a gifted cluster school that serves mostly minority and underrepresented populations of gifted students within the Atlanta Public Schools. Students are bused from their base schools once a week for gifted program services.
How will this project have a positive impact on those you serve?
Through years of teaching I have learned that when students are more aware of other’s feelings and emotions that they make better decisions in school and in life. If students are making better decisions based on this empathy, it is possible for many of the negative issues that affect students such as bullying, intolerance, peer pressure, suicide, conflict, and many others can be curbed dramatically.
It is critical to instill the importance of students being aware of others feelings and emotion in elementary school because often times it is too late to begin in middle school. Just by simply teaching the concept, empathy can be improved. By allowing empathy to be practiced and rewarded in this project, many students that my colleagues and I serve will be positively impacted.
Submitted by Lesli Burton & Latoya Jenkins
Department of Learning Excellence Office of Gifted and Talented Education
Lena J. Campbell Academy
21 Thirkield Avenue, SE
Atlanta, GA 30315
404.802.7540 Phone 404.624.2007 Fax
"With regard to excellence, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it." - Aristotle
THE POWER BEHIND THE GRANT
I couldn’t have created a grant and articulated it better to showcase why the Leadership Garden Legacy exists.
While Ms. Burton and her colleague Ms. Latoya Jenkins were teaching two units that were the springboards for this project, I was working on my blog series about using leader-friendly gardening practices to end bullying.
Talk about synchronicity . . . hop on over to the blog series to learn more but first read their story.
These fabulous teachers had created two leadership units for 4th and 5th grade students, entitled Leadership Legacies and Positive Platforms.
These units encourage students to develop leadership skills through self-evaluation, literature study, researching past and present leaders, and through public speaking. One unit is based partly on our children’s leadership development materials and Ms. Burton created the Leadership Legacies class blog.
If you want to see what the students are learning and the objectives in the Leadership Legacies unit, check out their class blog.
After receiving the application and seeing what they were doing, I was curious to learn more. I asked Ms. Burton how the students were responding to what they were learning and she shared this story.
“Just yesterday Ms. Jenkins and myself combined classes so that students could present their Positive Platforms (issues they see as problems and are taking steps to help correct). One student (11 year-old girl) has interviewed a girl others call a bully, and has started to connect with her to show her the dangers in it, and also some positive alternative activities.”
Now that is power.
I asked more questions, and Ms. Burton expanded upon this effort.
“What was so powerful was that the one student got permission to interview this other student on video. The students who watched the presentation gave such wonderful suggestions for how the student could be helped. Instead of vilifying her, they showed true empathy. We were really proud of them. Our administrator actually walked in and did our observations during that time so she was excited to see what was going on. My class made connections by advising what types of weeds needed to be weeded from her garden and what seeds she already had that could be sprouted. Since the student is ‘loud’ they suggested ways she could use her voice for good instead of bullying, such as public speaking.”
In my humble opinon, this story pretty well sums it up about the power of developing children’s leadership.
Be sure to check out our Empowerment Tools and Cutivation Grants to see how your school or organization can grow thriving leaders today!
