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Leveling Up Leadership: Building Diverse Leaders Today for Tomorrow

March 16, 2022
5:00 pm
- 6:00 pm

Location

Venue

Fleishman Commons, Sanford School of Public Policy
201 Science Dr
Durham, NC 27708 United States
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Event Sponsored By

Polis: Center for Politics
Sanford School of Public Policy
The Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society

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Picture of John Rose and Deondra Rose

Join the conversation about empowering diverse leaders with John Rice, Founder and CEO of Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), and Professor Deondra Rose, for this year’s Robert R. Wilson Distinguished Lecture. Rice is a leader in fighting racial and economic disparities in the business world and helps transform the careers of people of color. Hear how Rice teaches diverse students and professionals to tap into the social capital they need today so that they can serve as strong leaders tomorrow.

Sanford Student Voices: John Rice, Centering Racial Equity in Leadership Positions

America’s current system is broken. Only 1% of Fortune 500 company CEOs are African American. Only 2.5% and 3.4% are South / East Asian and Latinx, respectively. The organizations, public and private, are seldom run by individuals who look like me and my peers of color.

Headshot of Hamza Mohamoud
Hamza Mohamoud is a current senior and first-year Master of Public Policy student from the suburbs of Atlanta. He is completing his degree in public policy with a minor in global health while also pursuing an MPP focused on the intersection of health, environmental, and social policy.

John Rice, the founder and CEO of Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), echoed my worldview during his event Leveling Up Leadership, Building Diverse Leaders Today for Tomorrow at the Sanford School of March 16 in conversation with Sanford Professor Deondra Rose.

With his life’s work in racial equity and economic mobility in the private sector, Rice strives to change the system from the inside out. MLT is a national nonprofit organization on the frontlines for the push toward increased racial equity throughout companies and their leadership. MLT prepares men and women of color for jobs that deliver economic mobility for themselves and their family.

I have always been taught to believe in the “American Dream:” if you work hard enough, you will find success. My teachers and parents taught that a four-year college will set me up to achieve a well-paying, fulfilling career. However, Rice noted that 60% of Black, Native American, and Latinx four-year college graduates work at jobs that require less than a college degree to work? This shatters the idea of the “high school to college to career pipeline” that we assume is true. For Rice, MLT and other racial equity organizations need to focus more on that final step: the jump from college to career.

Click here to read his full reflection.

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