Leadership Defines the Success of Your Future

For you to grow and deliver value in today’s competitive and volatile environment, being a leader who knows how to execute the best strategy and get the most out each opportunity is a key success factor. Effective leaders have the right mindset, leadership skills, and behaviors to thrive. Naturally, the best way to engage our student leaders and develop them for success is through targeted leadership training and great leadership programs that utilize experiential learning and are tailored to the each student’s need. As such, Dream To SOAR is dedicated to empowering young people ages 14-24 from diverse backgrounds to tackle the most critical issues of the day.

Through innovative programming and partnerships nationwide, our program provides young people with the training and tools they need to succeed in the modern economy and lead the change that they want to see in their communities. The work fuels the powerful transfer of social capital and significantly broadens the reach of the organization beyond the constituencies it has traditionally served. Our program is data-driven and guided by a model that integrates cutting edge academic theory.

Our Mission

The DTS Leadership Development Program (LDP) identifies, cultivates, and amplifies future generations of talent to engage in a values-based leadership essential for transforming their lives and society for the better. DTS LDP is a multi-site program that nurtures groups of diverse youth committed to addressing the most compelling social, political, mental health issues facing their communities. The program is designed to:

  • Connect talent to opportunity
  • Develop passions into purpose
  • Transform vision into action

The Leadership Gap

Youth leadership development is too often left to chance or fails to achieve durable impact at a time when communities and the nation are starved for highly competent, effective, authentic, and socially conscious values-based leaders.

  • Only 1 in 10 businesses believe a college education adequately prepares graduates with necessary workforce skills (Gallup, 2014).
  • Calls from the public and private sectors to increase workforce diversity have largely gone unanswered despite clear evidence of organizational benefits.
  • Only 50% of colleges and universities offer formalized leadership programming despite evidence that leadership development contributes to college persistence.
  • The lack of formalized leadership development has dramatic consequences for local leadership pipelines and the ability for all sectors to optimize impact.

Our Approach

The DTS Leadership Development Program accelerates leadership development as well as the student’s understandings of how to create change individually and collectively both in and outside of systems.

Each year, graduates from our Ready, Set, Go! Youth Development Academy are selected with particular attention paid to recruiting low- and moderate-income youth to join our coveted Speaker’s Bureau. Upon completion, students enter a life-long network designed to support their success and provide opportunities for internships, and speaking engagements.

By recognizing the innate talent of young leaders as well as the communities in which they live, DTS LDP rebuilds leadership talent pools moving from community-supported to community-owned by partnering and investing in local adult and organizational capacities.