The Mount Leadership Society prides itself in educating and amplifying the scholars to be a leader, commit to service, and act for social change. As the motto “Together for Good” bonds each of us to our history, another prominent “coming of age” experience binds the past twenty years together: Mount Legacy Week or MLW. The logistics behind MLW is for first-year Mount scholars to design and implement two team projects based on a social change theme between health, poverty, education, abuse, education, or global with a partnering agency. The planning for projects begins in early November and concludes in late February, occurring during a three-week period. Mount Legacy Week’s purpose is to honor Ruth Weimer Mount, the first dean of students at Ohio State, for her active role in the Buckeye and Columbus community and thus I was proud to be a Lead Builder for Team Education for the 2019-2020 school year.
My oversight project partnered with After School All-Stars, a local education agency providing afterschool tutoring and enrichment for students in the Columbus City Schools district. Coming from Akron Public Schools and hosting a background with elementary student engagement, this project became personal as students deserve the right to development opportunities beyond state curricula and classroom antics. The project was titled All-Star Leadership Workshop aimed to connect leadership concepts to students’ framework interactive activities including reading, team building, and followership. As a result, sixty (60) K-5th grade students were impacted within a two-hour time frame of a team of 8 people serving alongside the agency’s amazing staff and volunteers.
Overall, Mount Legacy Week provided immense learning opportunities for me to develop as my leadership abilities were tested and my commitment was assured. As one of first leadership roles in my collegiate life, I had struck a balance between my knowledge and experience with those surrounding me to find comfort in the process altogether. Operating on a team full of personalities and varying ambitions is often a struggle to unite and, as a first-year, pushed me to reconsider how I approach a meeting to maximize team engagement. I realized my strengths of strategy and traits of conviction were my salient proponents while realizing that being vulnerable and “dare to ask” would be my personal upliftment in times of trial. Therefore, I recognize why this event is a hallmark of the Mount experience and why it can be a powerful model to learning personal leadership abilities as we all become stronger in our commitment to community change and social change initiatives.
