Overview
The Urban Leadership Academy (“ULA”) was founded in 1997 as an organization dedicated to gathering promising urban Christian youth from varied denominations and races together to experience servant leadership training to serve their perspective communities. Through this servant leadership development training the ULA has empowered almost 500 young people, 70% are of color, to become stronger faith leaders in their church and community. Through their service learning projects, these young people have impacted the lives of over 45,000 people by contributing over 100,000 hours (approximately 40 people years) of community service within the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
Since its inception the emergence of Urban Leadership has grown to serving a wide variety of communities through diverse offerings of leadership training and multi-ethnic coaching. We have engaged students and mentors, small business and non-profits, to effectively train leaders to better impact their communities in both public and private sectors. Urban Leadership is now attempting to position itself to powerfully impact the cities beyond our borders. Last year we ran a successful pilot of training 10 students and 3 community leaders in Denver, Chicago, and Milwaukee. We believe that we have created a working model that can help tramsform communities by re-engaging its most precious assets (community residents) to serve as leaders.
The Eli Lilly Foundation (“Lilly”), a strong supporter of the ULA, has contributed greatly to the launch and then the initial growth of the program. Lilly recently made a 4 year, $600,000 commitment to the ULA to accelerate the expansion of the program; contingent on receiving matching funds.
Beginning in 2008, the ULA is enhancing the depth and breadth of its program offerings to include:
- Sponsoring Twin Cities Urban Youth Workers meetings on a monthly and annual basis: attended by more than 25 urban youth pastors monthly, the ULA provides fellowship, mentoring and training.
- Further diversifying the denominational and racial participation: ULA staff and new board members have expanded relationships in the Evangelical, Catholic, and Lutheran governing bodies and churches; also in Hispanic, African-American, Liberian, and Hmong communities.
- One of the two academies will be an overnight residence program for all students permitting more fellowship, teaching, and service projects.
- Increasing student graduates from 45 in 2007 to at least 85 in 2008, including at least 15 graduates from metropolitan areas other than the Twin Cities. Reflecting the significant impact on the lives of its students, ULA graduates who are now youth leaders in urban churches in Denver, Chicago, and Milwaukee have each expressed an interest in bringing students from these cities to the ULA overnight academy in 2008.
In the event the ULA graduates in 2008 each complete a service project in the 10 months subsequent to graduation similar in scope and impacting a comparable number of people consistent with the collective experiences of the 330 graduates to date (approximately 240 hours of community service by each graduate while impacting 90 people), 85 graduates in 2008 would provide approximately 20,600 hours of community service while serving 7,700 people during the 10 months following graduation.
