Beginning Is Exciting. Staying with It Is Different

Beginning something is exciting.

Staying with it is different.

Enthusiasm eventually encounters schedules. Good intentions meet competing priorities. Projects become complicated, other people disagree, and confidence rises and falls. Real leadership begins to look considerably less romantic.

That is precisely why the Sullivan Fellows Program exists.

Fellows is designed for students who want development beyond a single event. Through a multi-year, cohort-based experience, students continue working on leadership, character, relationships and contribution long after the initial excitement of beginning has passed.

The framework for that work is Sullivan’s ARC Leadership Model: Agency, Relationships and Contribution.

Agency begins with ownership. Before asking how other people or institutions should change, Fellows are asked to examine their own choices, habits, strengths, responsibilities and capacity to act.

Relationships acknowledge something equally important: almost nothing meaningful is accomplished alone. Students learn to listen, build trust, work through differences and understand that relationships are not an accessory to leadership. They are often the means through which leadership becomes possible.

And then comes Contribution.

What will you actually do?

“We are not trying to create students who simply know more about leadership,” said Dr. Jody Holland, who leads faculty engagement and the Sullivan Fellows Program. “We want them to become people who take responsibility, listen well, build trust and understand that their abilities carry an obligation to contribute. That kind of development does not happen in one weekend. Fellows gives us the time and the relationships to keep working on it.”

The Fellows Summit at Sullivan Weekend becomes an important checkpoint in that longer process. Students reconnect with their cohort, reflect on what has changed since they were last together, encounter Fellows at different stages of development, and have an opportunity to see whether ideas discussed months earlier have survived contact with real life.

Sometimes they have. Sometimes they haven’t.

Both outcomes can teach something.

“Fellows is designed around the idea that leadership development takes time,” Holland said. “Students need opportunities to reflect, practice, make mistakes, build relationships and come back to the work again. ARC gives us a framework for that growth through Agency, Relationships and Contribution, but the real value comes when students begin applying those ideas to their own decisions, their communities and the way they work with other people.”

That is what distinguishes a longer developmental experience from a weekend. There is another conversation after the mistake. Someone asks what happened. There is another opportunity to try.

The student who began by asking, What do I want to do? gradually encounters a harder question:

What kind of person will I need to become to do it well?

Applications are now open for students ready to begin that work.

Sullivan Fellows Application Deadline: September 11, 2026