Tag Archives: Chad Williamson

Understanding Eagle Rock’s Work With Noble Impact

Since spring of 2013, staff members from our Professional Development Center have been working closely with the folks at Noble Impact in Little Rock, Ark., to help that organization develop its inaugural INSTITUTE program, which was held last summer in Arkansas. For the uninitiated, Noble Impact is a nonprofit committed to engaging kindergarten through 12th graders as they traverse the intersection of public service and entrepreneurship.

Noble-Institute-2Chad Williamson, the co-founder of Noble Impact, visited us here at Eagle Rock years ago and was impressed enough to come back last year to see if we could help his team by collaborating on the creation of curriculum for the first INSTITUTE program.

The INSTITUTE of Noble Impact is more than an all-caps nine-letter non-abbreviated acronym. It’s also a noble concept — and the first of its kind summer program with a single goal in mind. That purpose is to commit students to enact social change.

Now here’s where it gets weird. The idea is for these students to perform a noble public service while practicing entrepreneurship. Can anyone say oxymoron? Is this a conflict in philosophies? Helping others while helping yourself? How do these seemingly opposing philosophies meld into a single action with a combined purpose?

The INSTITUTE — working in concert with the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service — skillfully addresses the dialectic between public service and entrepreneurship. The challenge for students is to find practical approaches to “making a difference” in their community.

The weeklong summer program challenges INSTITUTE students to think about community issues, ideas for solutions — ultimately creating sustainable impact.

For our part, Eagle Rock’s Professional Development Center staff helped Noble think through its Continue reading…

Perspectives On The Professional Development Center At Eagle Rock

As the staff at Eagle Rock’s Professional Development Center know all too well, teachers often feel frustrated by the obstacles they face in building sustainable and effective educational relationships with their students. More frequent testing, district policies, or tight financial circumstances can all work against a committed teacher’s desire to put his or her students first. Sometimes, all it takes is a change of perspective to see the way past these obstacles, but that can be hard to do when one professional development consultant comes to a school, or district.

The new perspective is often seen as yet another obstacle: something added on to all we have to do. However, when you bring 4-5 different teams together, each with their own obstacles and each with their own perspectives–and when you add to that a fabulous mountain retreat setting that literally elevates their thinking–very interesting things can happen.

This June, I had the opportunity to do just that at Eagle Rock’s Professional Development Center. Director of Professional Development, Michael Soguero, invited me up from my home in the foothills to work, specifically, with Chad Williamson from Noble Impact, a promising Arkansas start-up. Chad’s looking to help high school students blend entrepreneurship and public service with the help of the Clinton School of Public Service and the Walton School of Business. That alone would have been a fascinating experience. Chad’s wrestling with two highly successful visions of opportunity for America’s youth, and trying to identify the threads that unite them at the individual, group and team level of service. The different levels of this challenge are at the heart of his model and, working with Chad and Eagle Rock staff Dan Condon (Associate Director of Professional Development) and Collin Packard (Public Allies Teaching Fellow in Professional Development), we were able to hammer out two weeks’ worth of curriculum that we’re confident will lead to action, first in Arkansas and then, hopefully, around the country.

A lot of what happened, however, was rooted in the other perspectives that were in and out of our work sessions, community gatherings, and evening activities. Eagle Rock’s recent decision to mix perspectives by hosting multiple site visits simultaneously worked wonders. Staff from Valemont Secondary School in the heart of BC’s controversial tar sands “patch” could empathize with the challenge of motivating students to see the value of working for the public good, locally. Scholars and field workers from the Continue reading…