 episode of In the Studio. My guest today is Greg Bourne. He is the co-found executive director of Lead for Tomorrow. Our topic is an organization that is doing a great deal for the world. Welcome, Greg. Thank you, Lynn. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about Lead for Tomorrow. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the mission that you have? So we began Lead for Tomorrow. We started in the end of 2011. So we've been around for about nine years now. We built off of a great program in the Hawaiian Islands that was focused on parenting. Now we did that because as we began Lead for Tomorrow we were thinking about the future and the future of our society, the future of our communities, the future of our families. We really believe that if we're going to have healthy societies we need healthy communities and that begins with having healthy families. And we see so much unfortunate dysfunction and challenges today in families and in communities. We designed then some programs to try to address these concerns. When we first began thinking about more peaceful and healthy societies we thought about when do you need to really start this work? You can't just be looking at the problems that we encounter but what's the genesis? And we realized that what happens from birth to five is the most important time in a child's life. 85 plus percent of brain development occurs in that time. So we felt that if we could start with families with young children we could help them hopefully create a better environment, a more nurturing environment for their kids which then helps them to be better adjusted and contributes to their communities which then builds to healthier societies. And that's really our mission. Strong families, sound families, caring communities and a healthier more peaceful world. Well it's a wonderful enterprise and a very very worthwhile and timely mission. So thank you for that but I know that you have an impressive background and so I would like to know a little more the road that led to this new enterprise. Well life is interesting you know and if you had asked me 10 years ago or actually not 10 but 15 years ago if I'd be in the non-profit world working in this arena I would have had to scratch my head to think about that. But isn't it wonderful? It is wonderful. It's a whole new you know world and landscape but it's it is it's terrific. I've spent much of my career with universities. I was at the Georgia Institute of Technology for a few years. After that I was affiliated with a program that was housed at Sac State and more recently some programs at UC Davis. So I've spent a lot of my career in some way affiliated with academic institutions but I've also been a consultant to local government, state national government you know and some international work as well. So it's been a blessing to be able to work at these different levels of government and society and working with people across the socioeconomic spectrum and so it's it's it's been what I think of as a living laboratory because I'm always learning or at least trying to learn how to connect with people in a more effective way and to try to solve problems in a more effective way. So for about 30 years I was a mediator and I still do some of this work in the public policy arena. That's very interesting yes. Yeah and about 10 well now about 12 years ago I was invited to help facilitate a meeting in the Hawaiian Islands to look at how to create a safer world and while it was not directly involved with my work mediating public policy disputes I thought this would be fascinating and so what that led to is helping to start a nonprofit from that work which led to kind of the next generation lead for tomorrow. So that was the single event that inspired you. I think so yeah. I'm surprised that Hawaii doesn't have safe societies or that that was old you just happened to be there. It just happened to be there. That particular conference was initiated by a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii who'd written a book called Non-Killing Societies and he was he was making a point that 99 plus percent of human beings have never killed another human being. So it really is not just kind of a natural inclination in fact quite the contrary. Sure. And because he was there and this was an international conference of leaders from 45 different countries that's really how it began in Hawaii. It's very interesting. Now there is you mentioned by the way lead for tomorrow if you'd like to know more about all the programs of this organization you can go to their website which is www.leadfortomorrow.org and you'll probably see a display on our screen. There is something that triggered my curiosity when I was reading about you and your company and you mentioned that lead for tomorrow advocates a new model of leadership and of course I was intrigued and I wanted to know what what is the new model. Yeah well I'm not sure there I don't mean to put you on this one. No no no no problem. I'm not sure there are really any new models of leadership but it's as you know about there are numerous books on leadership and a lot of times it's repackaging and changing the terminology of work that's been done in the past. So perfect for going to sleep sometimes. Exactly but we have three programs within lead for tomorrow one is our family who we positive parenting program. Yes and we're going to ask you a little more about that. Exactly and the other another is our East Africa initiative and the other our third leg of the stool is our what we call community leadership program and through this program we really try to impact leadership from the local neighborhood all the way up to elected officials to try to support more open transparent interaction between communities and the leaders and help leaders have a better sense of how to connect to the community in a transparent and genuine way. Unfortunately a lot of public involvement is often check the box we need to do this I think over the years many elected officials have seen the value of genuine public involvement to help shape societies and shape communities and so we promote a style of leadership we call facilitative leadership. Interesting and the idea is to and there's a lot of research behind this and it's really an integration of various kinds of leadership thinking and research but the idea is to realize the potential in the people that you're working with yes and try to pull out their leadership capacity and build their capacity to basically make an impact on their own and recognize that everybody has opportunities to exert leadership whether it's a parent in your family or being on the PTA and and helping make your school stronger all the way up to being an elected official. Well you know that's very interesting because I think philosophically that's knowing or believing that human beings are born and are profoundly good and so we're you know being deviated by bad habits or abuse or simply being copycat and the leadership is very very important for that. Do you give classes or do you teach this model? We do we do currently we're doing some work for first five Sacramento they give small community cooperation grants to neighborhood leaders who think uh who identify of them yeah they identify an issue in their community and then first five sag gives small grants and we train or support I think is a better way of saying yeah we support the community leaders who identified through the as recipients of these grants. Well that's a wonderful initiative because very often the community leaders are are isolated from um from the political sphere and the higher ups and the ones who make decisions and so on so that's great. Tell us a little bit about the Hui Foundation programs. I know that it's a sort of like a subset of your lead for tomorrow isn't it? Correct. Yes and they have their own website. We do. But you can get to them by going to lead for tomorrow. Correct. Yes. Correct. Family Hui when we first started lead for tomorrow and as I mentioned earlier we thought about how can we begin making the greatest impact. It just so happened because I was in Hawaii at the time working a lot that there was a program there called Baby Hui which had been operating for many years and so we had to make a long story short an opportunity to acquire that program and when we did we expanded the age range to birth to five years old so we could include school preparedness and subsequent to that we've added resilience into the program since we brought it to California in 2014. We've incorporated resilience based on all the work that's being done in the last several years on trauma and the impact especially of adverse childhood experiences or ACEs and so we find that a lot of parents are carrying some of their childhood trauma with them and so if we can interrupt patterns of potential dysfunction by helping parents see their own challenges and becoming more resilient they can then pass that to their children. Well that's very interesting and there's a lot of research going on about manipulating memories and traumatic experiences to to cure in some ways so but and the program in Africa in East Africa I believe. Right yeah and we're working in four countries in East Africa four countries Tanzania Uganda those two primarily yes and also Kenya and Rwanda and we picked that area because we have from our previous work that I mentioned in Hawaii we knew people in that part of the world who we could partner with and our model of doing international work is that we work with partners on the ground who we trust who we can have a working relationship with and build on the assets that are there we're very much not a part of these programs or you helicopter in and try to help people solve the problems that we identify right we're trying to work with local communities local leaders and support them or we can and so we were invited in a few years ago to bring a positive parenting program subsequent to that we've added some of our community leadership programs we've added work to once you've gone through our positive parenting modules yes then learn how to start a small business to generate nutrition for the family income and create more of a nurturing environment for families where do you see lead for tomorrow go in the future do you have some strategies that you'd like to share for for us well I think our programs try to have a personal touch to them we're not going to necessarily put thousands of people through our positive parenting program we're more likely to really focus on the people that are in the program and really make sure that they're benefiting from the program and the same is true in Africa so we but we do envision taking family Hui to more states in the United States we do see our community leadership program also can stretch around and then integrating those into international work and we already have potential possibilities to work in other places internationally but believe you need to really take it slowly and make sure that we're culturally relevant and that our programming that it's done well exactly and of course I'm going to ask you about your fundraising efforts I'm sure that it's a continuous effort it is and I think this has been the one challenge for me personally coming from the private sector and university setting into the non-profit world yes and so we're fortunate we have a major grant from the office of child abuse prevention here in the state of california but that's wonderful and that is congratulations you know move forward and we're always looking to build a downer does it have string attached meaning you can only use it in california or yes it's primarily to help create a parent leadership network to work for preventing child abuse and neglect yeah and so otherwise though as we can build a donor base from people who think what the work we're doing is important then it allows us more flexibility to expand into some of the other areas well I'm afraid our time is up it's incredible how 15 minutes when you really have an interesting topic that it goes very fast so thank you so much Greg Bourne for being here for taking a little time out of your day to talk to to us in the studio and thank you all for watching you can see this program again this episode again when you go you can stream it actually when you go to our website dctv.davismedia.org and while you're there you can check some of your other our other programs we have many interesting topics and fabulous guests so from all of us here at Davis Media thank you for watching and see you again soon