In four days I start my year-long program at the Rainier Valley Corps Fellowship with nine other fellow members and the dedicated staff. We start off our journey with a retreat in Marysville for three days. I'm thrilled to meet the other fellows and folks involved in nonprofit organizations in Seattle. I'm also excited to begin working with the Somali Community Services at which I was placed. I'm gaining as much knowledge as I can about nonprofit business through blogs like nonprofitwithballs.com (of which the author is the founder of RVC) and readings about social justice and collective leadership.

Something I'd like to share in a paper written by Dale Nienow about Collective Leadership:

"Collective Leadership is a practice that develops the conditions that allow a group of committed individuals to co-construct solutions to challenging issues from a place of learning rather than from having predetermined answers."

I'd also like to add this quote regarding leadership in the Tao Te Ching, written by Lao Tzu:

"A leader is best
When people barely know he exists
Of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled
They will say, "We did this ourselves."

With that, I sign off.
World and Inner Peace,
Andy