A Community Unlike Any Other

Four years ago, Harvard Radcliffe Institute launched an experiment. 

The idea was simple enough. In 2019, as part of her strategic vision, Radcliffe Engaged, Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin proposed a youth leadership development program based at Radcliffe that paired high school sophomores with Harvard undergraduate mentors. With the pandemic under way, the Emerging Leaders Program launched as a fully virtual offering, but in 2021, after months of meeting over Zoom, ELP began holding all its sessions in person. 

Since its inception, much about ELP has changed, but three of its mentors have returned for the third year in a row. When they joined the program in 2021, Tilly Krishna ’25 and Jana Amin ’25 were first-year students at Harvard College, while Justis Gordon ’24 was a second year. If you ask them why they’re here, their answers all lead back to the program’s incredible community of mentors, mentees, and staff. 

“The ELP family is one of the most warm, welcoming, and open-to-evolution communities that I’ve seen at Harvard,” says Amin. “And the impact is very profound on these high school sophomores.” 

Defining Emerging Leaders 

The program’s overarching goal, says Sherri Sklarwitz, director of ELP, is to “work with students to develop the skills and confidence to become effective social change leaders in their communities”—an especially challenging and important objective when adolescent mental health has been steadily declining over the past few years. 

The ELP staff facilitates weekly sessions on Radcliffe’s campus, where mentors engage their mentees in discussions and learning activities. The sessions sometimes include a trip to the Schlesinger Library to look at the archives of such social change leaders as Angela Y. Davis and Pauli Murray. 

During each session, mentors also work with mentees on “social change action plans” aimed at improving the mentees’ local communities. The projects, which are selected by the mentees and developed in collaboration with their mentors, engage with a wide variety of issues. One of Amin’s mentees developed a workshop series with the goal of increasing financial literacy among Black women, while several of Krishna’s students designed projects around fostering gender equity in schools, supporting women in STEM, in sports, and in advanced classes. 

The weekly sessions help the high schoolers “learn about what their leadership style is, about the history of different social change leaders in America and in the world, and inspire and motivate them to believe that, even as sophomores in high school, they can actually do something,” says Krishna, who studies government with a secondary in economics. 

The second year of high school is the optimal time to provide supportive opportunities because the sophomores are beginning to think about their own interests and notice issues impacting their schools and wider communities. They also haven’t adopted the “one foot out the door” mentality of older students. 

Expansion 

During their time with ELP, Krishna, Amin, and Gordon have seen the program grow from hosting 30 high schoolers per year to 97, and the list of participating schools has doubled. Meeting with students in person is “very meaningful,” says Sklarwitz, because “even small things like being able to have snacks together do so much for building the community of the cohort.” 

“The purpose of ELP has become a lot more solidified” as the program has expanded, says Krishna. “I’m very proud of how far the program has come. It’s something that I started my freshman fall, and it’s grown with me.” 

The programmatic offerings for mentors have become more robust over the years, with increasing opportunities for leadership, training and professional development, workshops, reflection sessions, and socials to connect with other mentors. Amin, Gordon, and Krishna have each taken on new responsibilities as their ELP-related knowledge and experience have grown. Gordon and Krishna both served on ELP’s curriculum development committee, helping to plan and evaluate learning activities and materials for ELP sessions, and Amin worked with ELP staff on recruitment efforts for College mentors. 

“Though ELP was largely focused on the high schoolers’ development in the first years, the staff came to realize the ripe potential for investing in our mentors as well. By strengthening our programmatic offerings for both mentees and mentors, the bidirectional learning becomes exponential,” says Amanda Lubniewski, ELP’s student engagement specialist. 

Gordon emphasized that the program’s growth has brought a wider range of perspectives and experiences, on the part of both mentors and mentees, into the classroom, while the core values of ELP remain unchanged. This diversity of perspectives not only provides more opportunities for learning across difference but also keeps the program interesting for returning mentors. 

“Every year, it changes a little bit because you’re given completely new students with different ideas,” says Gordon, a human developmental and regenerative biology concentrator with a secondary in global health and health policy. “So that keeps the work very new and very refreshing.” 

Community in Practice 

The magic happens when the mentees begin to grow in confidence and step into their roles as leaders. Mentees are often shy when they first enter the program, notes Gordon, but “you can see the students start to see themselves differently and understand their power” over the course of the year. 

Amin—who is concentrating in Near Eastern languages and civilizations and anthropology with a secondary in ethnicity, migration, and rights—says all the mentees bring with them their personal stories, but the “leap between articulating a personal story and recognizing its connection to a broader social issue is one of the most incredible things you can see happen” over the course of an ELP year. 

This personal growth is helped along by the environment created by staff and mentors alike: a space that allows mentors and mentees to feel comfortable expressing their ideas in a way that is different from how classroom discussions typically take shape. 

“I don’t feel like I have to come as my academic self,” Krishna says. “I can just come as my entire normal self, which includes the academic self, but it’s not the part that I feel like I have to force out.” 

It’s this openness that enables mentors and mentees to learn from each other—because reciprocal learning is integral to the program. “The connections you make, the perspectives you gain, and the skills you are helping your students learn as they’re addressing issues within their community inspire you and make you a better person, leader, and learner,” says Gordon. 

Finding a Niche 

Amin emphasized that one reason ELP stands out as program is it draws on Radcliffe’s history as a women’s college and its emphasis on feminist organizing. 

Radcliffe has always been about expanding access to high-quality education—Radcliffe College (originally the “Harvard Annex”) was created to offer women the same level of education that men received at Harvard—and ELP continues this legacy. Moreover, the archival materials that ELP students engage with are a testament to the value that Radcliffe places on civic engagement and organizing for social change. (The exhibition Rewrite, Organize, Remix, currently on display, exclusively showcases Schlesinger collections from feminist groups that mobilized against injustice.) 

“I’ve always found it hard to find student spaces on [Harvard’s] campus that feel fulfilling and meaningful,” says Krishna. “ELP is one of those. There’s a reason I’ve stuck with it for three years and I will probably do it next year as well. It’s because the values of the program really align with mine.” 

But beyond providing time, space, and financial support for Harvard students to live out their values and practice advancing social change, there is an intangible aspect of ELP that draws mentors back. 

“There’s no other space on Harvard’s campus that is the same as the Emerging Leaders Program,” says Gordon. “There’s so much care. There’s so much passion within the community. And it’s so inspiring and enlightening. I think that the community is what has brought me back every year. You can tell that everyone—staff, facilitators, mentors—really wants to be there.”

Sam Zuniga-Levy is a writer at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.