The Sentinel Leadership Academy works to heal the trauma created by violence driven by ignorance, fear, hatefulness and desperation. Our efforts to establish a critical mass of well-informed and courageous citizen leaders has started to yield fruit and results. Our four cohorts have produced graduates who are deeply committed to transformational uplift. We have helped both those who were already organic leaders by encouraging them along a trajectory of development and impact that they had already established; and those who needed to develop a higher sense of self efficacy rooted in improved levels of self-understanding and awareness of social resources, and a sense of connection to the history of their community.

As the program has matured, we have begun working with a significantly larger proportion of youth and young adults. This increased representation of young adults and high school age participants is both a sign of the success of our changing iterative strategies with each class and a factor in the effectiveness of our current most diverse and representative cohort. We continue to refine our tools of engagement, development, and assessment to improve our impact and our understanding and praxis of uplift and transformation.

We are adding asynchronous classes to our curriculum to allow even deeper analysis of our impact on student thinking and conflict resolution skills and other valuable competencies in the future. Our effort to include web-based instruction or Learning Management software into our strategy was inspired by the presence and input of younger Sentinels.

We have anecdotal evidence of intergenerational mentoring and post-course cooperation and contact that has produced positive results in our communities. Several community events and initiatives have been born in Sentinel Class and spearheaded by our graduates. Block Party events, community discussions, movie trips and other celebrations are an outgrowth of this important work.