Our story begins in 2017, two years after the first LEAD Hub, LEAD Monrovia Football Academy (LEAD MFA), was established in Monrovia, Liberia. After just two years, LEAD MFA was demonstrating statistically significant impact on its student-athletes’ leadership ability, and it had become a highly regarded leadership development institution in Liberia.
In 2017, while reviewing LEAD MFA’s early evidence of impact on its Liberian students and simultaneously studying global leadership trends, LEAD Edu’s founder and founding board members recognized an opportunity to build a generation of ethical, empathetic, and entrepreneurial leaders across the globe.
Together, we established LEAD Edu to create and support a network of holistic leadership development organizations. An in-depth landscape analysis revealed that leadership development programs have proliferated since the turn of the century, but the vast majority of those programs have focused on post-secondary school youth. LEAD Hubs start earlier, preparing primary and secondary students for future opportunities at renowned institutions such as African Leadership Academy, Ashesi University, and more.
In 2019, LEAD Edu helped establish the second LEAD Hub, LEAD Morocco, creating a more holistic approach to leadership development and proving that our leadership development model, if contextualized properly, can be effective anywhere. Today, LEAD Hubs educate, feed, and train 240 future Liberian and Moroccan leaders every day, as well as more than 2,000 additional children throughout the year.
In 2020, LEAD Edu launched a second program, LEAD Learning, to amplify our impact globally. As the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to standstill, staff from LEAD Edu, LEAD MFA, and LEAD Morocco came together to update our leadership course for the future. Today, LEAD Learning prepares thousands of youth outside of our Hub ecosystem to thrive in the 21st century by teaching critical thinking, problem solving, and social and emotional learning skills. To date, LEAD Learning has reached more than 135,000 Liberian, Moroccan, and Bangladeshi children.
As we look to the future, we are poised to amplify our reach and expand our impact. By 2025, we aim to have 4 financially stable Hubs empowering 1,000 future leaders every year. In addition, we aim to be delivering LEAD Learning in 10 countries, providing critical leadership lessons to more than 250,000 children annually.
