20 years of answering the call

Community Voices: The Power of People Leadership Institute

If you want to know what is really going on in a community, you must get to know it… and then listen to it. You cannot believe most media, as they typically share only small parts of the fabric of a community, and the stories represent only a tiny percentage of the people living there. The most important aspect of every community is the people who live in it. Why? They know the heartbeat, the highs, the lows, the gifts, the resources, the challenges, the pain and the trauma. In other words, they know what they have and what they need.

People often ask how my husband, Brother Shane, and I started The Power of People Leadership Institute, and what inspired us. The answer: our community called, and we answered. In 2005, I received a call from North High School asking me to come and “talk” to the girls because of an increase in fights, girl gangs, and a decrease in academic engagement. Of course, I said yes. I wanted to honor my community and be part of the solution by listening and offering my gifts, talents and resources. What I didn’t know was that when I saw the faces of our North High girls and felt their heartbeat, I would have to respond with more than one talk. I saw so much potential, but I also saw so much pain. I walked out of that auditorium knowing in my spirit that I had to do more. I had to provide a solution. The result was the launch of Girls in Action.

Not long after, my husband received a different kind of call involving another part of our community: men serving time at Faribault Correctional Facility who were caught in the vicious revolving door of incarceration. The community wanted Brother Shane to “talk” to the men so they would change their lives, return to their families, rebuild and never again see the walls of a prison cell. Like me, he thought he was giving one talk, but when the men asked him to come back, he knew he had to be part of the solution. We launched the RePlanting Program to stop that revolving door and reduce recidivism among the men coming home.

Now we had two programs: Girls in Action, a weekly in-school mentoring and empowerment program for girls in grades 6-12 that was growing like wildfire across Minneapolis Public Schools; and the RePlanting Program, a pre-release, 10-week personal development and leadership training that attracted hundreds of men. But the community was not finished calling us. People began asking, “What about the boys?” We responded by launching Boys of Hope, a parallel mentoring program for boys aimed at disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline.

One Saturday morning, as we discussed all the work we were doing, it became clear that we needed to formally start a nonprofit. In 2003, I had released my first book, “The Power of People: Four Kinds of People Who Can Change Your Life,” and I used its core tenets to write the curriculum for Girls in Action and Boys of Hope. Brother Shane used those same tenets to build the core training for the RePlanting Program. That day, we decided to name our organization The Power of People Leadership Institute, because we truly believe that people are powerful and that we live in a powerful community.

On May 8, we celebrate our 20th year and the impact we have had reaching more than 7,000 girls, 1,500 boys and 6,000 formerly incarcerated community members. We have a saying at our institute: “We are the help we have been waiting for. Nobody else is coming.” We are proud to have a legacy of love for our community, of answering the call and providing the leadership to be the help our community needed, and still needs.

Dr. Verna Cornelia Price is the co-founder of The Power of People Leadership Institute. For more information, visit popinstitute.org.