Ethics and Servant Leadership
Shaping and Forming the Next Generation of Community Leaders
The D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership (EASL) shapes and forms future community leaders by teaching servant leadership to and promoting ethically engaged practice by Emory students, faculty, administrators, and staff. Under the leadership of Edward Queen, Associate Teaching Professor, Director, D. Abbot Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership (EASL); Associated Faculty Member: Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Graduate Division of Religion, Islamic Civilizationss Studies and Mary Rachel Henderson, program coordinator, the EASL program aids, inspires, and supports all members of the Emory community in striving to serve and lead for the common good.
EASL Programs
The Forum
The EASL Forum is a weekly academic-year program for undergraduates focused on service, community building, and leadership development. The Forum consists of 15 to 20 students from across the university who learn and serve together over the course of 22 weeks from September to April. The shared journey focuses on four areas: integrity, personal growth, bridge building, and community engagement. The Forum meets weekly for two-hour collaborative sessions that provide students with the skills and knowledge to become future community leaders.
View Forum Program Information
Servant Leader Summer Internship
The Servant Leader Summer Internship program provides students with an intensive and structured internship/service learning program unavailable in the typical course. The summer internship begins in May and continues through July. It requires a minimum 270 hours of service and includes classroom instruction that provides students with essential leadership and ethical skills and gives them an opportunity to reflect on their experiences. Throughout their work and the classroom component, students will be engaged in an ongoing process of learning about and reflecting on what it means to be an ethical leader and the practices one must cultivate to be such a leader.
View Internship Program Information
EASL Program Mission and Vision
Amid declining civic involvement and growing cynicism toward public institutions, universities must take seriously their role in cultivating and forming tomorrow's community leaders. Inherent in this work is the need to develop intellectual rigor, ethical awareness, and a concern for the common good in those leaders.
University students, with their intense but often inchoate passion for service and the advancement of humane values, have the potential to become the ethical leaders demanded by the pressing moral, social, political, and economic challenges facing the United States and the world. The D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership helps Emory students become tomorrow's ethical leaders by building strong connections among teaching, research, and service.
The program uses the model of servant leadership. Servant leadership rejects a view of leadership that is about the self-aggrandizement of the individual with positional authority. It maintains that true leaders are those attuned to working to improve human flourishing and doing so in partnership with the individuals among whom and the communities in which they live. To advance its mission, the EASL program advocates increased attention, throughout Emory, to ethical action, leadership studies, theory-practice learning, community-based research, and community service.
It was wonderful to hear about EASL and see how the program has grown! I'm very grateful for my time with EASL and think it's a really great way to have Emory students more engaged with the Atlanta community and learning about servant leadership.
EASL develops within Emory students an obligation to community service and provides them with the knowledge and skills they require to become future community leaders dedicated to the common good. Key to this work is helping students realize that whatever positions they may hold in the future—firefighters, teachers, lawyers, physicians, parents, voters, elected officials, nonprofit and business executives, civil servants, artisans, or anything—they can play a central role in enhancing human flourishing.
The EASL Program is generously funded by an endowment from Mr. William B. Turner in memory of his father, D. Abbott Turner.
Contacts
Director, D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership (EASL); Faculty, Graduate Division of Religion, Islamic Civilizations Studies; Associated/Affiliated Faculty, Department of Religion, Tam Institute for Jewish Studies
Program Coordinator, D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership (EASL) and Healthcare Ethics Consortium (HEC)