I cannot help but preface this report with an admission of fear. Before commencing both summers of the Laidlaw Scholars Program, its Holiness the Pit in My Stomach deepened with the apprehension of being an unsatisfactory element in an unsatisfactory project. Just as I feared I had given myself an ambitious research topic, similarly I sensed choosing this Leadership-in-Action project had put me at the cusp of an experience I was underprepared and ill-equipped for, the luxury of which only comes with the numbing ability to say that you could even do it. Unlike the first summer, I came around to a centrally organized LiA unexpectedly, when my initial plans fell through. So, when I applied to the Make Sense Americas program in Medellín, Colombia it was with a slight sigh of resignation.
The summer of research was in several senses a six week-long test of my abilities as a keen observer and required discretion when reading, absorbing, conducting participant obervation or interviewing bookshop owners and staff. For all this, my arrival in Medellín after industrial shredding in bureaucratic machinery was both relief and disbelief and the familiar humidity and tropical scent welcomed me to the city well into the night. There I volunteered with Fundación SORA, a social organisation for the children and elderly in Medellín’s Comuna 13, a neighbourhood infamously wrought with a history of violent crime and political sectarianism gestated by its drug trade in the 1980s and 90s.
I learned alongside the members of my 2026 Laidlaw cohort in the weeks preceding the LiA, that the three Cs of leadership are change-maker values, character, capacities. And then we learned as preparation for the LiA, to organize our ideas into easily executable SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) goals. These are very useful mental frameworks in which to foreground any fieldwork, and our program facilitated by Make Sense and the Laidlaw Foundation tailored it perfectly to these parameters. Although as I'm now seasoned enough to know, work on-site is inevitable unpreparedness and preciously so.
During our first visit to SORA, we were introduced to Comuna 13 and its shanty towns, the founders of SORA and the spaces where they work, including the restaurant, which can feed up to 60 strong at a time; the café, a lovingly decorated cultural coffee space alongside a Media Lab with eight monitors; the classroom, where graffiti workshops and English language classes are held for the children. Our group of five volunteers was tasked with three main ‘deliverables’: activating their Media Lab, helping SORA build its presence in the community via website and social media, collaborating the foundation with partners that could widen its resources.
Formal ‘deliverables’ and in-person execution of work are astonishingly distinct from each other. For their visibility, we managed to prototype a website and design social media posts, additionally a comprehensive list of organisations SORA could collaborate with was also produced. For the Media Lab we came up with some sessions in AI literacy, digital art, and programming basics as a means of talking about how computer functions work and what you can do with them. Similarly, we ran a reading challenge, a session on emergency medical awareness and personal hygiene, a film screening, and facilitated a graffiti and origami workshop. Producing and documenting our deliverables, preening the process for its outcome and working in a completely randomized team was a lot easier when the 3 Cs framework and SMART goals were taken into consideration. They were extremely beneficial in this respect, and prior awareness of them sharpened the quality of our work. But it is worth mentioning that these were organized working environments familiar with such pedagogies. What happens when you exit this concentration?
While running sessions in the Media Lab (for instance with Scratch or Canva), we found the children naturally gravitated towards what functions or tools they were interested in, relegating the specific tasks we had assigned in the activity to a secondary position. Similarly, for a team of people coming from backgrounds in higher education and having been raised in deep-set reading cultures, interacting with children for whom books were more boring than interesting was a revelatory experience. Where I, who study literature full-time, would dissolve into any congregation of words, the kids I was sat next to were more bothered about the physical copy of the book, its paper and printing, illustration, why the font looks like it does and why characters are named funny. I am enamoured by the sweet stubbornness of finding yourself and your perceived position subverted, ignored or simply played with. The children at SORA re-instilled some of the cheeky mechanisms of my own childhood, the cornerstone of which was to maintain an element of play likewise to embody playfulness in any situation.
Just as the first summer unshuttered my mind to the vastness of researching bookshops as community spaces, as well as their immortal ability to reinvent and persist despite financial hardships in an unforgiving and increasingly capitalist system, this summer allowed me to internalise some of that versatility I was writing about. I've grown more accustomed to the plasticity of 'leadership' (which is why I enclose it in quotes) and its infinite capacity to suit individual strengths as I learned in terms of my own in this case. And to do so requires keen listening, open comprehension and simply the will to do it. I was reminded of the Oxford Character Project’s emphasis on humanity and humility as core traits of leadership, and could draw on our prior discourse to inform my actions. It permitted me to apply a strong moral and ethical awareness to the activity I was carrying out.
Both of my Laidlaw summers took very different and contrasting courses. Where last summer was about persevering and giving utmost completion to the work I had shouldered, this one was about instilling all that work with sensitivity and play. Likewise at the end of both, I have produced work that I am proud of but see further potential in. At their conclusion, I find myself a better leader and seeking further learning. I owe unfathomable thanks to our Laidlaw coordinator at St Andrews, Celina O’Connor, the cohort of 2026 at St Andrews, my advisor of research, Dr. Rosa Campbell, Daniela Garavito and Samantha Diaz from Make Sense Americas for overseeing the LiA, and most of all, The University of St Andrews, Lord Laidlaw and the Laidlaw Foundation for facilitating access to these invaluable experiences.
So long !