Not long after D’Ivonne Holman became director of development for Northern Virginia family services nonprofit Britepaths in 2018, she signed up to participate in Leadership Fairfax, a leadership development organization focused on local and regional challenges in Fairfax County. Her boss, a Leadership Fairfax alum, encouraged her to apply.

She was accepted into Leadership Fairfax’s class of 2019 and joined a cohort of 50 classmates over the next 10 months for a series of discussions, workshops, field trips and trainings.

Holman acknowledges she had some reservations at first, but she quickly became a fan. Not only did she interact with people from across the county she might never have met otherwise, but she also got the chance to visit professionals at their workplaces and gain insights into health care, law enforcement and the justice system.

One memorable road trip brought the class to Richmond and the General Assembly, where they learned about Virginia’s legislative process. Another time, a chance comment during a discussion — “always assume good intent” — shifted the way she looks at leadership, she said.

Would Holman recommend programs like it? “It was great team building, it was great networking, it was very beneficial to me as a leader. … What I got out of it was leaps and bounds beyond what I had anticipated,” said Holman, now development director of the nonprofit Lamb Center, a Fairfax homeless shelter. “It was also more of a time commitment than I anticipated. But it absolutely was worth it.”

Over the past half-century, leadership development programs like Leadership Fairfax have sprung up around the state. Many are managed by local chambers of commerce; others are run through universities; some operate as standalone nonprofits.

Despite variations — some focus on civic leadership, others on business professionals, politicians or nonprofit leaders — the programs share common elements. They bring together class cohorts of business and community leaders to discuss and learn about important issues, with the aim of fostering connections that will last far beyond the time spent in the program.

While many participants join to strengthen their résumés, the programs themselves have loftier goals. They aim to create connections that can reach beyond the boundaries of class, race, gender and politics.

In these divided times, is that even possible?

Smells like twin spirit

It is if you ask the leaders of Bristol, Virginia. Or Bristol, Tennessee — the twin cities with the same names are famously divided down the middle of State Street, with Virginia on one side and Tennessee on the other.

In Bristol, “we have two of everything,” says Beth Rhinehart, president and CEO of Bristol’s Chamber of Commerce. Two state legislatures and two city governments. Two sets of state laws and city ordinances. Two public school systems. And so on.

“No matter what part of the country you go to, there’s always talks about regionalism,” Rhinehart observes. “That means on a very core, basic level that you’re collaborating for something bigger that’s more beneficial than the way you do it already. We have to do that in Bristol. … We can’t operate unless we collaborate.”

To help bridge those divides, the Bristol chamber created the Executive Leadership Institute. Participants, who pay $2,500 tuition, meet for a full day every month from September through May. The institute targets “more seasoned” leaders from the community, Rhinehart adds.

Participants may live in Tennessee but own businesses in Virginia, or vice versa. By building connections and learning how things get done across the region, and by whom, they gain insights into ways they can solve complicated cross-border problems. That includes complex and thorny ones like the Bristol, Virginia, landfill, which has been sending odiferous fumes wafting onto properties in Tennessee.

The city of Bristol, Tennessee, filed suit over the landfill in May, accusing its Virginia sister city of air and health violations. In June, following recommendations by the Department of Environmental Quality and a panel of experts, the city of Bristol, Virginia, announced a settlement, saying it would close the landfill by Sept. 12 and fix the odor emissions, an engineering project estimated to cost at least $15 million. The Virginia city also agreed to pay $250,000 in compensation to Bristol, Tennessee. But as of early July, it was still unclear how Bristol, Virginia, would dispose of its trash in the future.

“It’s not a quick solution but it’s a step toward a solution,” says Rhinehart, herself an alum of the Sorensen Institute, a leadership program based at the University of Virginia. “When you see something successfully demonstrate what can happen with collaboration and working across all different kinds of lines — perceived or real — it’s hard not to be an advocate for it.”

‘Swimming upstream’

The Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership launched in 1993, a time of political turmoil in Virginia. George Allen, a pugnacious Republican, won election for governor in a landslide that ended 12 years of Democratic leadership in the commonwealth.

Since then, the institute has pursued a straightforward goal: to connect Virginia’s civic leaders and help them find common ground, no matter how many other things may divide them. Well over 1,000 participants have graduated from the nonpartisan program, including state senators, county supervisors, city council members, local administrators and many more, including current Attorney General Jason Miyares and the directors of other leadership programs.

“There is an element of career development,” says Sorensen’s director, Larry Roberts. “There’s also a desire to understand what civic leadership means. These are people who are frustrated by the tone of politics.”

Roberts, who served as legal counsel to Gov. Tim Kaine and chief of staff under
Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, went through Sorensen in 2001. “I did not know about the various regions,” he recalls. “I spent most of my adult life in Northern Virginia. … To be able to visualize the settings and have professional contacts across Virginia was really helpful.”

Sorensen’s flagship Political Leaders program gathers one weekend a month, from March through December. Participants visit regions across Virginia, hearing from local experts. Topics include collaboration, civil discourse and building trust. (Other Sorensen programs, such as Emerging Leaders, are less time intensive.)

Recently, Roberts says, Sorensen has seen an increase in applicants “who want to know how government works,” including health care executives.

“We view it as our mission to help people navigate a divided society, and one where cooperation is not always rewarded,” Roberts says. “We see so much tribalism. People really value a place where they can get other perspectives.

“They’re not checking their political philosophies at the door,” he adds. “But not every issue has to be political. … Are we swimming upstream? Yes, I really do feel we are sometimes. But the vast majority of the public wants to see collaboration.”

Bridging divides

Collaboration is a founding principle of Leadership Metro Richmond.

Founded in 1980, LMR is among the most established leadership development organizations in Virginia. Its creation dates to a time of deep tension in the state capital. Reeling from the civil rights battles of the 1960s and ’70s, which led to legal conflicts over county boundaries and annexation, Richmond and its regional neighbors seemed to be at constant odds with each other.

The city’s chamber of commerce created the program to encourage civic discourse. LMR’s first class of 40 people drew from a wide range of professions, including a city council member, an architect, a corporate lawyer, and several business leaders.

While the issues LMR addresses have shifted as the community has evolved, LMR’s goal has not, says Myra Goodman Smith, LMR’s CEO and president. “It’s still a space for challenging, courageous conversations,” Smith explains.

LMR classes work to resolve “top-level challenges” submitted by community advocates and nonprofit organizations, such as the shortage of mental health facilities for people in crisis. As LMR class members learn about these issues, they are taught methods to help them work together to solve these problems across divides of race, class, culture, education and income.

“People will say that LMR has changed their lives,” Smith adds. “That’s the power of LMR: to have conversations with people who don’t agree with you and won’t agree with you. We don’t do debate — we do dialogue.”

Smith sees LMR’s influence everywhere in the region. LMR’s more than 2,000 alumni include members of Congress and the General Assembly as well as business, civic and nonprofit leaders. “Whenever I open the paper,” Smith says, “I see LMR graduates.”

Concrete results

Much the same can be said of Lead Virginia. Launched in 2004, with the strong support of then-Gov. Mark Warner, the Richmond-based organization works to build leadership across the commonwealth.

In its earliest years, Lead Virginia focused on local leaders. Since then, befitting Warner’s résumé as a CEO-turned-politician, Lead Virginia has shifted toward bringing together business and nonprofit leaders and high-level government administrators.

The program aims to make these leaders familiar with communities and people all over Virginia and, especially, with each other. Traveling to regions across Virginia, participants “build relationships” during the roughly seven-month program through shared tours, meals and experiences, says Susan Horne, Lead Virginia’s president and CEO since 2007.

And that can lead to concrete results, she adds. When she took part in the program in 2006, one of her classmates was the CEO of a large gas company. During a trip to Martinsville, the class saw firsthand the high unemployment rate in that part of the state. Inspired to act, the CEO brought a call center to the area, creating 200 jobs. He never would have known about that need if not for Lead Virginia, Horne says. “He saw it firsthand in our travels.”

Lead Virginia focuses on top-level management — “We are not an emerging leaders program,” Horne explains — and emphasizes the value of seeing and solving problems. “We’re not just telling a chamber of commerce story,” she says. “We want people to understand the good and the not-so-good.”

There are more than 800 Lead Virginia alumni. Horne has seen a positive impact from introducing participants to parts of the state they may have been unfamiliar with, while connecting leaders and teaching them the tools of civic engagement.

“I have a sense that there is a cultural shift happening in Virginia,” Horne says, “an appreciation for working across jurisdiction lines that benefit multiple areas.”

That shift may not always be visible in politics, she acknowledges, but “Virginia is in a better place today than we were before Lead Virginia.”

Local leadership

Like people, communities come in all ages, shapes and sizes. Leadership programs follow suit.

While programs like Lead Virginia focus on statewide issues, smaller programs do much the same on a local level. Take, for example, Smith Mountain Lake Leadership Academy.

Smith Mountain Lake, a fresh-water reservoir in the Roanoke region that was formed when Appalachian Power built the Smith Mountain Dam on the Roanoke River in the early 1960s, is a popular vacation and tourism spot. The 32-square-mile lake spans three counties — Bedford, Franklin and Pittsylvania — and its chamber of commerce has more than 700 business members.

To work across those county lines and the divides that could form between recent arrivals and longtime residents, the regional chamber created a leadership development program in 2020.

Andy Bruns, a former Roanoke regional newspaper publisher for Lee Enterprises Inc., was hired as CEO and president of the chamber soon afterward. He had participated in leadership programs in his former career and says, “Programs like this are extremely valuable for communities. I was so happy when they developed the one here.”

Tuition is $750 and includes monthly half-day sessions for a full year. Participants make site visits — to a local creamery or an alpaca farm, for example — and explore the challenges of a region where million-dollar lakefront properties sprawl alongside aging doublewide trailers.

“Smith Mountain Lake is an extremely wealthy pearl in the middle of a poverty pocket of Western Virginia,” Bruns says. “There’s got to be a way to connect the guys in the $7 million house with people down the road that are food-insecure.”

Classes take on projects to address such issues. “We know we’re not going to fix poverty, though sometimes really good ideas come out of those projects,” Bruns says. “But more importantly, people come to understand that these problems are very complex and take a whole lot of people to solve them.”

He adds, “If we can generate even a handful of people who are better educated about their community and have met the right people in order to engage in the community, we can make a difference.”