by Roger Bairstow, Executive Director, Jubilee
Months ago, our Board was tasked with finding a name for our new Broetje Family Trust office building. While it may seem like a simple task, it took upwards of a year to find the right one. A name says a lot about the vision, mission, and purpose of an organization, not to mention the ambience of the actual building!
Our company culture aspires to welcome and love all, and to embrace the spirit of servant leadership that is core to our community building work. Staff, board members, friends and family all weighed in and nothing seemed to feel quite right as we considered suggested names. Then one of our leaders recalled the story on the first page of our Servant as Leader primer that we include in our SL course:
“The idea of The Servant as Leader came out of reading Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East. In this story we see a band of men on a mythical journey… The central figure of the story is Leo who accompanies the party as the servant who does their menial chores, but who also sustains them with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some years of wandering finds Leo and is taken into the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, whom he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader.“
The Servant as Leader, R. Greenleaf, 1991
As we reflected, we came to the agreement that we could feel good about the name “Leo Center,” which we hope will inspire new servant leaders as much as it did Robert Greenleaf. Further, we hope that you will visit us in the new building upon its opening, scheduled for late August.