Want to make a positive and significant difference?

Mission

The purpose of the Center for Faithful Leadership is to enhance campus-wide efforts to educate students for lives of leadership and service in a global society through academic and co-curricular programs. The vision of the Center for Faithful Leadership is that Hope graduates a large cadre of students who are more confident in their leadership abilities and more effective in servant leadership; "so that those served grow as persons [and] become healthier, wiser, freer, more [secure], and more likely themselves to become servants" (Robert Greenleaf). Our method is to teach and learn leadership from the inside out.

We define a leader as someone who makes a significant difference. While we see the results of leadership, we believe what we don't always see—the character of the person and the processes used—is of greater importance. We therefore define a servant leader as someone who makes a positive and significant difference by helping others meet their need to make a positive and significant difference. The inter-related steps in servant leadership involve feeling the needs of others, reflecting on one's calling, doing (testing) that calling, and thinking about what one has learned. In doing so, the servant leader learns to be internally-motivated, open-minded, others-focused, and purpose-driven.

Our programs engage students on this path. Those programs include a leadership minor, a leadership certificate, mentoring, support for students in leadership positions, and the Institute for Project-based Learning. The path is distinctively interdisciplinary, integrative, and intimate. It is interdisciplinary in that we bring together students from many disciplines to practice attitude-changing, communicating, critical thinking, decision-making, learning, and team-building processes. It is integrative for three reasons: we attempt to (1) practice leadership from a Christian perspective; (2) synthesize various perspectives and points of view; and, (3) bridge theory and practice. Our goal is to develop the person as well as the mind. Finally, we are academically intimate: we seek to customize the leadership experience for each student.

The primary way we deliver leadership experiences is through intense project-based learning experiences. In so doing, we become more emotionally intelligent (self-aware, self-managed, socially aware, better at managing relationships) (feel), we share ideas about our calling (reflect), we test and challenge (do), and we read and discuss what we've learned (think). Together we make a positive and significant difference by helping others meet their need to make a positive and significant difference.