Our founder, Stuart Gordon, has always been passionate about Leadership development. In 2012, as a Caldwell Fellow graduating from the NC State College of Education, Stuart was blessed to be selected as a founding member of the Wake Young Men's Leadership Academy (WYMLA).
In 2019, Xavier King joined WYMLA as principal. He saw Stuart's passion for leadership development and gave him the opportunity to re-shape the school's leadership program. Leaning on his experience as a Caldwell Fellow at NC State, Stuart advocated for a new leadership elective course called Sophomore Seminar. Over the next 3 years, Stuart helped build this course into a pillar of the school's student experience. As part of this course, students take on leadership application projects around the school including designing and implementing their own leadership lessons for younger students. They also design and implement their own service projects to impact the school community. By inspiring, equipping, and empowering Sophomore students as leaders within the school WYMLA has seen them transform the culture of the school through their leadership.
In 2021, 9 years into his career at the school, Stuart was asked by the Wake Young Men's Academy principal, Xavier King, to build a curriculum for school-wide leadership development. Appointed to Lead was birthed out of that request so that this leadership curriculum could benefit students all over the country. After strong success, and student leadership growth of 22% in their 2021-2022 school-year pilot program, Stuart decided to branch out full time into Appointed to Lead. The Wake Young Men's Leadership Academy continues to be one of our annual partners and from August 2022- September 2024 we've been able to help more than 1,500 students become the leaders they were made to be in collaboration with over 20 partner schools, student-groups, and community organizations.
With all of our partners we live out our experience that when students are given the opportunity to lead within their school, and the support to do it effectively, there is no limit to what they can accomplish.