Rebuilding means new leaders

Malcolm Cash has a plan for creating leaders.

He's all for black folks honoring past leaders but says maybe we should celebrate less and emulate more.

Toward that end he has started an effort to teach and inspire high-school and college students to become leaders. He's calling it the Katrina Leadership Project, because he says a failure of leadership set the stage for devastation along the Gulf Coast and the slow response that followed.

Cash is an English professor at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio, but he's relying on Seattle-area friends to help him launch the program. He was here raising money and organizing last week.

Katrina hit in 2005 as he arrived for a term as scholar-in-residence at Bellevue Community College. Cash and BCC counselor Ron Taplin, who arranged Cash's stint here, spent many Friday evenings discussing political and social issues with students whose enthusiasm impressed the Ohioan.

He went back home but stayed in touch with Taplin and some of the students. He also followed the rebuilding in New Orleans, which has largely left out the poorest wards, and decided the city's many underlying problems needed a longterm, strategic solution.

Cash came up with a plan, a leadership-training program in which 20 college students will help a group of professors teach 40 high-school students who were harmed by Katrina.

The 60 students will spend six weeks at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and will meet members of Congress and other leaders who they'll learn are just like them, except better prepared.

Their studies will range from public policy to math, skills they can take home and put to use.

Learn more about the project at www.klpdc2008.com.

Robert Beckstrom, dean of arts and humanities at Lorain, calls Cash a visionary, the kind it takes to launch such an ambitious project. He'll need someone to manage the details, but he'll provide the fire.

Cash has tried to choose students who are smart but need a push to achieve more. People like him.

He was an avid reader who did poorly in school. Often he skipped classes and spent his days reading in a library.

Cash dropped out of high school, but a man from the Upward Bound program convinced him he could do better and offered him a hand.

His mentor challenged him to do the same for another student someday.

One of the BCC students Cash took under his wing, Jonathan Woldaub, had a 2.5 GPA.

Cash helped him see school as preparation for making a difference. Now Woldaub is a junior at the University of Washington majoring in political science and modern African Studies. His GPA is 3.5 and he's one of several UW students, many of them children of African immigrants, participating in the project.

Cash said black people aren't born to play basketball or excel at music.

It's all about preparation. Somebody has to put a child on a path and teach her the skills she needs to reach her goals.

"If we can learn those things, we can learn leadership," he said.

Amen to that.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.