Program Supported By
The Jackson Grown Leader Fellowship brings together a select group of high school seniors for mentor investment, skills development, network building and knowledge growth during the critical final years of high school. It is designed to give each Fellow a personalized leg up for their next stages of learning and advancement.
About the Program
The Jackson Grown Leader Fellowship began in the Fall of 2021. For the Jackson community within and outside the city limits, it centers on two core ideas: the need to invest forward and the opportunity to reinvest back. Building on those ideas, it is structured around three objectives: understanding community, launching ideas, building networks.
For the twelve selected high school juniors and seniors who take part, the program includes in-depth discussions each week with local and global leaders who represent many passionate, rebellious and humble individuals from Jackson leading in a variety of ways in a variety of places.
These are discussions, not lectures. Leaders and students speak as equals and as members of the same community. They offer perspectives inaccessible to the other, both for the student and the established professional.
Those insights are brought together at the end of the spring semester with a speech by each student at the Annual Challenge to the City. This is a TEDx-style presentation in which Fellows identify a local challenge in Jackson-Madison County and imagine what solutions could look like. Seniors also publish articles in the Our Jackson Home magazine on the challenge which he or she has addressed.
Finally, the program has begun building a broad network of Jackson community members and is based on the willingness of respected individuals across a wide range of areas to serve as professional mentors to each of the Jackson Grown Fellows depending on their academic or professional interests.
“We are eager to explore the unique gift that Jackson has to offer the world through the heads, hands, and hearts of the people that have called it home.”
