When I entered the Laidlaw Scholars Program through our spring gateway course, my understanding of leadership was defined largely by analytical precision. I viewed strategy as a collection of frameworks: optimize the system, extract the metric, and streamline the workflow. Yet, across two years of academic research, colloquium dialogues, and Leadership-in-Practice summer with Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York (KCS), Laidlaw has dismantled that detached perspective. Being a Laidlaw Scholar has taught me that ethical leadership is not about managing structures from a distance; it is an act of human-centered curation, deep empathy, and radical hospitality.
Grounding the 3C Model: Character, Capacities, and Values in Action
The Laidlaw 3C Leadership Model provided the compass for navigating my work in New York, pushing me to integrate Values, Character, and Capacities into a cohesive leadership practice.
- Character Grounded in Humility and Purpose: Arriving at KCS, I was tasked with conducting a digital audit across their fragmented New York and New Jersey web and social media presences. From behind a laptop screen, it looked like a straightforward exercise in operational efficiency: reorganize navigation menus and merge brand channels. However, reviewing the digitized stories of senior meal sign-ups, legal aid clinics, and early childhood programs shifted my perspective. A broken link or confusing user interface is not simply an abandoned metric; for an immigrant senior or working parent, it is a barrier to essential care. True character required humility—stepping back from clean corporate models to recognize digital design as a front door to community survival and belonging.
- Capacities Across People, Process, and Performance: Translating purpose into impact required uniting all three capacity pillars. In Process, I developed a comprehensive digital UX optimization strategy and created an internal workflow guide for recruiting and onboarding student volunteer interpreters for KCS’s Immigration & Legal Services Department. In People, I managed multi-stakeholder relationships across organizational branches and bridged language gaps by engaging bilingual university students. In Performance, I aligned high-level strategic planning with grassroots execution, ensuring our frameworks directly supported Sustainable Development Goal 10 (Reduced Inequalities) by lowering structural language and navigation barriers.
- Living the Change Maker Values: Transitioning from desk analysis to field interviews in New York Manhattan and Queens’s Koreatown demanded that I be Brave and Curious. Speaking directly with Korean immigrant small business owners and restaurant workers revealed how deeply metropolitan life can isolate people across generational lines. That curiosity unlocked the insight that younger, second-generation adults and first-generation elders are wrestling with the very same search for belonging. This insight directly informed the foundation I designed for an intergenerational immigrant film festival.
Moments of Challenge, Growth, and Personal Reclamation
The most challenging dimension of this journey was navigating the ethical weight and power dynamics of storytelling. How do you design community programming and institutional branding without flattening authentic, lived immigrant experiences into marketing collateral?
This question held deep personal significance for me. Having been born in Korea but raised in Texas in predominantly white spaces, I spent much of my upbringing feeling disconnected from my heritage. Immersing myself in KCS’s mission and listening to elders and local business owners filled a long-standing void, allowing me to heal that personal distance and reconnect with my roots.
The experience taught me that ethical leaders must resist the urge to speak for a community. Instead, we must use our strategic capacities to build platforms where communities can articulate their own dignity and preserve their histories on their own terms.
Analytical Mindset (Pre-Laidlaw)
└── Efficiency-driven → Top-down metrics → Impersonal systems
Ethical Leadership Practice (Post-Laidlaw)
└── Human-centered → Digital hospitality → Intergenerational equity
Redefining Global Citizenship
Global citizenship is often conceptualized through international mobility and macro-level diplomacy. Through the Laidlaw lens, I have come to understand that global citizenship is fundamentally relational, local, and accountable.
Global forces, such as migration, diaspora, and systemic inequity, manifest inside neighborhood community centers and small storefronts. Leading as a global citizen means taking macro-level insights from sociological research and using them to dismantle local barriers to equity. Whether streamlining digital accessibility for non-English speakers or creating institutional pipelines for student legal interpreters, global citizenship demands ethical stewardship in every environment we touch.
Leading Forward
As I complete my final semester as a Laidlaw Scholar and move into my future academic and professional endeavors, my commitment is to practice leadership as community curation. I will carry forward the lesson that every data point represents a human narrative, and every system we build must be evaluated by who it welcomes in and who it leaves behind. Laidlaw has fundamentally shaped my trajectory, not merely by honing what I can accomplish, but by deepening the ethical responsibility I carry for how I lead.