In every city, a need exists for visionary leaders who establish and sustain positive trajectories for community growth. Such leadership in both the civic and corporate communities is essential to a city’s success. In the past decade, leadership development has shifted from strictly academic and personal to operation and connection to the broader community. As a result, emerging leaders must understand the dynamic histories and cultures of the cities where they have chosen to live, work, and play.

For the City of Memphis, the singular histories of music (Beale Street and the Blues, Sun Studios and Rock and Roll, Stax and R & B, WDIA) and entrepreneurship (Piggly Wiggly, Holiday Inn, AutoZone, and FedEx) serve as excellent examples of lasting, visionary leadership that originated in this city and spread far beyond the bounds of Shelby County. As we look ahead and seek ways to strengthen our community, it is important to re-establish our city as a new kind of distribution center: one of informed, capable, caring leaders successfully moving Memphis into the twenty-first-century global marketplace.

Many organizations in the Memphis area already realize this essential need as a component to rich programs and services. To include all such organizations would be impossible. Therefore, this research focuses only on organizations (or programs within larger organizations) whose primary mission is that of leadership development for adults. More specifically for the purposes of this study,the Shalom Community Involvement and Leadership Development Committee reviewed information on those agencies with a primary focus on community involvement.Thus, programs and/or agencies classified in this area are those whose main focus is the development of future community leaders.