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Community Colleges Returning Home Community Institutions for Community Leadership � Decker Ngongang In 2007 I left my job in investment banking at Bank of America to join the world of community activism and engagement. I had been involved in the community for some time while working at the bank; however, I craved more hands-on involvement in helping address some of my communities’ biggest problems. I was a graduate of Leadership Charlotte, a program that trains community business leaders to get involved in their communities. Yet, at the age of twenty-four, I was the youngest of our group of business leaders by nearly ten years and was in a different place in my career than the more experienced executives who were my classmates. However, I felt confident that there was no difference in my ability to contribute to the community. During this experience I decided that, instead of seeing community service and civic leadership as an extracurricular activity, I wanted to make them my full-time job. This realization led me on a new journey that ultimately brought me to Generation Engage and now Mobilize.org, where I have worked to increase young people’s civic participation. This journey also helped me see the importance of community colleges to the health of a community. I saw that in Charlotte, like too many other communities, we outsourced solving our community-level issues to the business community and others with money or corporate resources. I was grateful for my experience as a Leadership Charlotte member. However, I recognized that community leadership couldn’t be hierarchical : we need to create ways of empowering every level of our community with the resources to get involved, not just facilitate the business elite and their checkbooks as the sole community problem solvers. Likewise, we must provide high school students with the same opportunities community colleges returning home 189 that Leadership Charlotte graduates are afforded. And most importantly for this chapter, we must provide to community college students curriculums that not only prepare them for the workforce but also connect them to their roles as civic and community leaders. This provides the kind of new leadership model described throughout this book, in which the responsibilities for community leadership are not left to community notables, but are taken up by ordinary citizens and community members, the native leaders who so often attend our nation’s community colleges . I have found that this group of local leaders can have the greatest impact on addressing community problems. We just need to give these students more opportunities to take on these responsibilities as part of their education and beyond. I was positioned to have a nice, comfortable career in finance and to make a lot of money, yet I wasn’t satisfied. Through my participation in Leadership Charlotte I was afforded access to a conversation and to resources that many of my peers didn’t know existed. I had mentors who instructed me on how to get things done, including whom to talk to and how to talk to them. After spending eight years at Bank of America (four as an intern in college, and four as an associate) I craved using this kind of access to do good in the world and trying my hand at being a civic leader, a community activist. It was then that I asked a mentor, who allowed me to join in meetings, and with whom I discussed business deals, to recommend me for a community leadership position. His reply caught me off guard. He said, “You don’t have enough experience.” I was taken aback, even though it made sense to me. At the time I was working on a trading desk managing billions of dollars, was serving on multiple boards, and was involved in the community, but apparently I still hadn’t reached the mysterious threshold of being ready to contribute. I was qualified, but the ability of many people in our communities to contribute was controlled by an old leadership hierarchy that made community service a club requiring some vague criteria for participation. Like many people of my generation, I rejected this idea. I knew I was ready to contribute as a leader and also to catalyze the talents and skills of other young people. I soon quit my job at the bank and figured that, if I wasn’t experienced, I needed to get busy getting whatever he meant by experience. After leaving the bank I joined a grassroots engagement initiative...

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