Center for Tomorrow’s Leaders (CTL)

10-year pipeline for Hawai’i’s future leaders

SUMMARY

Center for Tomorrow’s Leaders (CTL) is an education-focused organization that engages, equips and empowers young leaders for Hawai‘i. Through extensive partnership with public high schools, CTL targets underserved students with relevant, engaging, scalable and research-based leadership classes. As part of the training, CTL youth learn innovation by developing projects that address their schools’ and island’s most entrenched issues. With the support of the Governor's Office through the GEER program, CTL is scaling this innovative work and providing more opportunities for graduates of these programs to lead in Hawai‘i. Ultimately, the goal is to build a 10-year pipeline to empower students from all communities with 21st century skills to become Hawai‘i’s visionary leaders.

PROJECT LEAD : Katie Chang

CONTACT :
kchang@ctlhawaii.org
(808) 721-9430

OUTCOME :

  1. Partnered with 15 public high schools to offer leadership classes to nontraditional student leaders

  2. Trained 485 students, including 146 from the neighboring islands in partnership with DOE teachers

  3. Advised 103 student-led projects

  4. Piloted project management micro credential with 28 students from James Campbell and McKinley High School

  5. Conducted 21 workforce and soft skill development workshops for alumni

  6. Drafted a 6-month LinkedIn strategy to bridge alumni and Hawai‘i’s employers - the group has grown by 24% in the last 90 days

LESSONS LEARNED :

Innovation must always begin with a student-focus. Designing programs with young people produces the best results. That focus really helped us with this work, especially during the challenges of the pandemic. CTL’s innovation through partnership with neighbor island schools has been so rewarding on both sides. We learned much during the process as well. As an example, industry-recognized credentials are valuable but require quite a bit of “translation” work between the student and corporate language. Overall, this was a perfect time to innovate and grow especially into our new post-high school network, Vanguard. We are grateful we had the opportunity!