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Tico Almeida did not have any questions about social justice when he came to Duke University from Waunakee, Wisconsin. In fact, he was in many ways a typical student, making good grades, tutoring at a local elementary school, and organizing his life as many other Duke students do around Cameron Indoor Stadium or the TV screen during Duke's basketball season.
Today, Tico has become an activist and community leader on the issue of products made in sweatshops. Through his efforts, students have mobilized around the issue and Duke has changed its policies. This evolution from "typical" student to activist came about through a program at Duke University called Service Opportunities in Leadership (SOL), which has evolved into an intensive yearlong leadership program for undergraduates that combines academic study, community service, leadership training, and mentoring.
The program's faculty director is Alma Blount, who came to Duke in 1992 to teach a course about strategic planning and problem solving in communities. Since then, she has expanded her teaching responsibilities, taking on faculty leadership of the SOL program in August 2001.
In many ways what Blount and her colleagues are trying to accomplish with the program is to transmit what Blount calls "the joy of public life." "I believe we become whole when we find creative ways to live together in community, when we develop an intrinsic sense of purpose and calling to engage with each other on the important issues that directly affect our lives," she says.
But that wholeness is missing from public life today and Blount believes it is programs like SOL that can bring it back. "What we all have in common is getting young people interested in public life and developing a public self. Just take a look at the world we live in. We face complicated social problems and growing disengagement from public life. To me, exercising leadership begins with asking questions. I see it as a process of getting groups, institutions, and social systems to focus their attention on difficult issues and to frame coherent problems."
What SOL does, Blount explains, is to provide a place and a framework for students to ask those questions and begin the process of addressing them. As they do this within the context of the program, they are constantly working with community members, faculty, and other students to reflect on and find meaning in the work in which they are engaged. That, according to Blount, is where leadership begins. "The definition of leadership that I use is the activity of getting groups, organizations, and comparable social systems to face different problems and to mobilize many resources and many different perspectives to solve problems."
In fact, Blount often starts her students off by having them look at the "traditional" definition of leadership. "One of the first things I challenge is the notion of a single leader, a person who has the answers, who rounds up followers, and aligns folks around a vision." Rather, Blount has her students investigate the real work confronting our organizations, companies, and public sector groups. "What does leadership have to do with it? Usually, this work requires that we find our bearings in the midst of complexity and rapid change. Often, the art is to mobilize people with competing values to work together on difficult, common problems. How can students learn to exercise leadership in these contexts more effectively down the road?"
This concept of leadership was derived from work Blount did with Ronald Heifetz, director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University when she was a teaching fellow in the Leadership Education Project in 1992.
And it is that concept of leadership that lies at the heart of the SOL program. The program requires that students become fully engaged in the issue they have chosen for the internship. Using community-based research projects, students are actively involved in community service, design a research project that addresses the need of the community agency they are working with, produce a report for the community at the end of their commitment, and reflect critically on what they learned during the process. "Research service learning allows students the opportunity to develop important new skills about research, social problems, and the challenges of working in communities. Students have to learn how to collaborate with community partners to frame a problem, plan a research agenda, and choose an appropriate research methodology," explains Blount in her teaching statement.
In addition to research, community service, and classwork that engages students in critical thinking about leadership and social issues, a key component of the program is the rigorous reflection process students participate in. Blount describes this component in her teaching statement, "the personal dimension of this reflective process includes weekly 'letters home' and personal essays. The documentary dimension includes training in field-based writing, photography, and filmmaking disciplines. Finally, the research dimension requires that students communicate and interpret their findings to each other."
Blount considers this part of the internship "the meaning-making process" and one that helps to open students up to "a personal and public transformation." After they have engaged in the reflection process, "students present their research to a public audience. Doing this serves an important purpose in helping them to claim what they have learned."
She goes on to say that this approach really works. "Students have no choice but to face these really confusing, disorienting questions. The program helps them to integrate their insights, to see how their service work is connected to bigger issues of structural change and how we can make structural changes."
Making those connections is something Blount has been interested in since childhood. Raised in Asheville, North Carolina in a large family with limited means, Blount attended a school with children from well-off families. "I didn't feel deprived but I did grow up with a sense of social divide. For a long time, I wondered, why are some so comfortable, while others have to struggle hard, and even then they barely get by?"
Those questions led to more questions and to a career that has centered on the issues of social justice, community organizing, and creating change. Prior to her work at Duke, Blount worked work with a variety of community groups, including a grassroots leadership development program and North Carolina's Smart Start initiative, and international, faith-based, human-rights organizations in the U.S. and Central America. She also co-founded an association that provides consultations to nonprofits and small businesses on a variety of topics.
With that long resume of community and organizational experience, Blount would be the first to admit that collective leadership is not necessarily easy. "It's clamorous, difficult, and messy but it's also democracy in action. It creates ownership. And it cannot happen with just one person providing the answers."
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