For more than 30 years Leslie Medine, educator, community organizer, and coach, has been inspiring young people to dream bold dreams—not just for themselves, but for their communities, too. In Medine’s mind, the two are inseparable: imaginative leaders see what’s needed, but healthy communities provide the organization, helping hands, and resources to make it happen.

Her work with high school students in Alameda, California demonstrated that teenagers could take the initiative in conceiving, planning, and implementing community projects. Recently, she turned her attention to young people in their next phase of life. Through On The Move, a Bay Area nonprofit group she co-founded in 2004, she is coaching emerging leaders committed to strengthening and revitalizing the public sector. Medine’s optimism is infectious. “It never occurs to me that anything is impossible. If something doesn’t work one way, I find another way.”

Medine's approach to working with young people

Medine’s approach to working with young people grew out of her own high school experience. When she was 16 years old, her political activist parents sent her to an alternative high school on Long Island. It was 1969, the height of the counterculture movement. In the spirit of the times, the Village School, the first in the area to be federally funded, was an experiment in academic democracy.


The superintendent gave the three teachers and 48 students carte blanche to design the curriculum and set policy for their school. Together, they figured out the course of study as they went along, including creating a student internship program in the city’s schools and nonprofit agencies. The experience, says Medine, transformed her.

“The adults didn’t know any more about how to proceed than we did. When I realized that kids, too, could turn their ideas into something real, everything changed for me.”

Toward the end of the school year, Medine’s family experienced a tragedy. Her father, a civil rights lawyer and community organizer, committed suicide. The three teachers rallied around Medine, giving her the emotional support she needed.

“If I hadn’t been in that school and had those teachers taking care of me, I would have been a broken person. Those teachers saved my life.”

The school had another lasting effect on Medine. Working as an intern in a progressive school awakened her love of teaching. When she graduated from high school, she knew that one day she would start her own school.

If the traditional way doesn’t make sense, change it

Enrolled at the University of Buffalo, Medine acted on what she had learned in her experimental high school: if the traditional way doesn’t make sense, change it. Rejecting the packaged course requirements, she created her own degree program combining social work, special education, and community organizing.

In her senior year, Medine was hired as an educational coordinator in a newly created, federally-funded program. “The person who hired me left it up to me to figure out what to do, so I set up the Mothers’ Center for unemployed moms, started an educational advocacy center for neighborhood kids, and created an oral history project for children to record their families’ stories. I ran the program for two years.”

Medine replicated the Mother’s Center in three East Bay communities

After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977, Medine replicated the Mother’s Center in three East Bay communities. While she enjoyed running community programs, she hadn’t relinquished her dream of opening her own school. In 1982 she co-founded the Beacon Day School, a private, alternative elementary school in Oakland. The school’s core curriculum, built around the arts, encouraged creativity and critical thinking. Instead of assigning children to grades, they were grouped by achievement levels. “Kids develop unevenly and differently from one another. The traditional notion that they should all progress at the same pace is absolutely wrong.” Beacon was the only school in the country to stay open 240 days a year, 10 hours a day to meet the needs of the students and their working parents. The students flourished and, before long, Medine was asked to introduce Beacon’s philosophy and methods to the public schools. She formed a nonprofit organization called Educational Implementors.

Travel to Italy

After 13 years of running the school, Medine was ready for a change. She traveled to Italy, staying with a group of artists remodeling an ancient villa. Over the course of the week, Medine watched with fascination as the project progressed, seemingly without supervision. Artists came and went, picking up where others left off,

Medine, herself, is a sculptor. She had grown up in a house filled with art, and many of her friends are artists. In her years of organizing school and community programs she had become an expert planner, but at the expense of practicing her art. The Italian artists reminded her of another way to work communally: set up a loose structure and let things emerge organically. Their example planted the seed for Medine’s next venture.

Invitation to participate in a community “visioning process”

Returning to the Bay Area, Medine was invited by Dennis Chaconas, the superintendent of the Alameda Unified School District, to participate in a community “visioning process” with the goal of making the public schools more effective. Medine agreed on the condition that students be included in the conversation.

“I asked 25 middle school students to tell me what their ideal school would look like, and they described it in detail. And when I asked them how they would get from here to there, they laid it out in detail again.”

Impressed by the clarity of the students’ responses, Medine went back to Superintendent Chaconas. She proposed starting a class, Effective Citizenry, in which students would get academic credit for addressing real problems in the community. “Give me 25 kids, not the best or the worst students, for one year, and let me work with them for three hours a day, outside of a school setting.”

Chaconas agreed, and Medine enlisted Diana Gordon, who had worked with her at the Beacon School, to assist her. The students called the class HOME, and the name stuck. As word of the class spread, more students wanted to participate. By the third year, 165 students had signed up for the class, with more on the waiting list. To accommodate the growing demand, Chaconas moved HOME back into a high school building and lengthened the class hours.

Working on real-world projects excited the students’ interest in learning. But what made the program so compelling was the genuine collaboration between young people and adults. Medine’s disarming honesty with students created an environment of trust and respect and the safety to challenge one another to hold to the highest standards. Students’ projects were subject to review by their peers, teachers, and an outside panel of judges from the community.

HOME’s first major victory—a campaign to have a skateboard park in their town—was a model of political and community organizing. Students petitioned the city council for a space to build the park and were offered a prime property at Alameda Point on the condition they take responsibility for completing the project. They rallied 900 volunteers, and in nine days they built the largest outdoor skateboard park in the Bay Area; City View Skateboard Park opened in 1998.

Another group of students started a drop-in center where mothers could take their infants and toddlers. The center evolved into Home Sweet Home, the first licensed, youth-led and fee-based preschool in the country. Today Home Sweet Home serves 20 preschoolers and offers a training program for teens interested in working with young children.

The students’ enthusiasm for “real-world” based education led to their questioning why the classes they found so vital were relegated to afterschool programs. Why couldn’t their whole school experience be organized around community projects? Medine had spent her professional career creating “developmentally responsive environments.” Persuaded that the students were capable of the sophisticated organizing required to start their own charter school, Medine offered to guide them.

She pulled together a team of 10 students, ages 15 to 18, to develop a school design. With coaching from Medine and a group of expert advisers the team completed the application in a record two months, creating a school that met the University of California college preparatory requirements. Next, they negotiated a 10-year lease on a 10,000 square foot building at a former naval station for $300 a month. After persuading the Alameda School District to grant them a charter, the Bay Area School of Enterprise (BASE), the first youth-initiated charter high school in the country, opened its doors in September 2001 with Medine as director. As evidence of its success, this past year the Alameda School District unanimously renewed the school’s charter.

Today, three student-initiated projects—HOME, Home Sweet Home, and BASE—are housed under the same roof and operate under the umbrella of Alternatives in Action, www.alternativesinaction.org, a nonprofit organization established by Medine and Gordon.

In 2000, Medine received a grant from a San Francisco foundation to do a follow-up study on the first group of HOME students, then 21 years of age, to learn how the experience had affected them. The students concurred that their college experience paled compared to HOME. They missed the excitement of working on real-world projects and their relationships with trusted adults. “I had thought the HOME experience would catapult them into active adult lives. Instead, they seemed lost.”

The students’ comments pointed Medine in a new direction. What was needed, she realized, was a program to help idealistic college graduates figure out how to use their talents to build stronger communities. Leslie resigned from HOME and in 2003 she and two colleagues launched a pilot project, On The Verge, to coach a new breed of leaders in the nonprofit sector. (See accompanying article.)


Conclusion

Medine has spent her professional career developing programs that challenge and nurture young people in an open and democratic environment, but she denies that she’s motivated purely by altruism. “I appear in the world as an extrovert, but I’ve created these programs so that I could have a place to thrive, too. I function best when there’s no posturing, when people talk to one another in real ways.” It is that “realness” that students respond to and make them believe, like Medine, that anything is possible.