2012 Red Winged Leadership Award
Posted by Joseph Phillips, Jr. on Monday, May 14, 2012 at 3:08 PM PDT
The Third Annual Red Winged Leadership Award ceremony took place on May 10th. The award recognizes local leaders who combine leadership and business acumen to make a positive social impact on the community. The entire process is organized by the students in our Graduate Leadership Formation Specialization (GLFS), who are guided by Professor Jennifer Marrone. There were 24 students in the 2012 GLFS cohort.
The three finalists this year were Jocquelyn Duncan (Work it Out Seattle), Killian Noe (Recovery Café), and Dan Wall (Opportunity Knocks). Jocquelyn is the Founder and Executive Director of Work it Out, which is a non-profit dedicated to getting high school dropouts productively re-engaged with the community. She became increasingly alarmed at the wasted talents of young people in her community and was called to act. In her remarks, she noted that there are 6.7 million high school dropouts in our nation, a daunting waste of talent, creativity, and energy. She advised the audience to consider our legacy - "what will you leave behind?" she asked.
Killian Noe moved to Seattle in 1999 and surveyed the community to find an unmet need. She concluded that there was not enough support for those recovering from addiction and mental health challenges. The result was Recovery Café. She advised the audience to be ready to take a risk and don't wait until you are 100% sure to launch a new initiative.
As a top executive at Expeditors International, Dan Wall was when he enrolled in our Leadership EMBA program. The program requires students to develop a legacy project in the workplace. Dan developed Opportunity Knocks based on his personal experience with Expeditors, where he started working at the age of 18. Opportunity Knocks identifies high school students who are not planning to continue their education beyond high school and offers them a part-time job with the opportunity for a full-time job if they meet Expeditors' expectations. The program began at the Seattle headquarters but has now branched out to offices around the country and, soon, around the world.
For her work in founding Recovery Café, Killian Noe was selected as the 2012 Red Winged Leadership Award recipient. Of course, all three finalists are winners and doing wonderful things to advance the Common Good!
The keynote speaker for the evening was Jim Sinegal, our new Senior Executive in Residence and co-founder and retired CEO of Costco Wholesale. It was Jim's second event of the day, as earlier he spoke to students in the Marketing Club at their end of the year event.
In his remarks, Jim chose to focus on the legacy of Sol Price, founder of Price Club, who Jim considers to be his mentor. Jim learned many things from Price, including that a business has a responsibility to the society it operates in. The creation of jobs with good working conditions is the highest service that a business can provide to society. Jim mentioned that the 30th anniversary of the founding of Costco would take place this fall, and that their original business plan called for 12 warehouse locations. Today, Costco has over 600 locations in eight countries.
We're very proud of the Red Winged Leadership Award and its effort to recognize an unheralded leader in our community! Our students in the GLFS do an amazing amount of work to organize this event, and they are to be congratulated for their successful execution of what is becoming a Seattle University tradition!
For more information on the Red Winged Leadership Award, including videos on the honorees, check out the website:
http://www.seattleu.edu/albers/redwinged/