Please join us in welcoming the newest member of the LT team, Andrew Spector! Andrew is serving as Program Manager and will help facilitate on flagship class days, assist with the New Voices Internship Program, as well as run Tulsa Changemakers. We asked Andrew some getting to know you questions. Check out his answers below!
What are you most excited about joining the Leadership Tulsa team?
Since moving to Tulsa in 2015, I’ve seen the valuable and measurable impact Leadership Tulsa has on its participants. I am eager to learn from the team behind that positive impact and play a key role empowering Tulsa’s current and future leaders to best serve their communities.
What is one thing about you few people know?
I fractured my back as a junior in high school, causing me to have to leave the soccer team and wear a back brace for 23 hours a day. With all the new free time, I dedicated myself to academics in a way I never had before – particularly through my commitment to the National History Day competition. Ultimately, that year of high school made a significant positive impact on my life.
How did you come to work at Leadership Tulsa?
In my first year of Teach For America in Tulsa, I started a youth leadership development and action program, called Tulsa Changemakers, with Jake Lerner, a fellow TFA corps member. During the Pilot Program last spring, Tulsa Changemakers approached Leadership Tulsa about coming under their 501c3 umbrella. This all happened while Leadership Tulsa was growing in other ways, too, adding Thrive and Hispanic Leadership Institute. Fortunately, this created a requirement for a Leadership Tulsa position including both Tulsa Changemakers and Leadership Tulsa program management responsibilities. For more information on Changemakers, visit their website.
What do you enjoy most about working at Leadership Tulsa or with Tulsa Changemakers?
Seeing the Changemakers lead. Tulsa Changemakers was built on the belief that youth as young as 5th grade can make a real and measurable impact in their schools and communities right now. In the Pilot Program, after hearing from the Tulsa community that crime, racism, underperforming schools, and unequal access to stores and grocery stores are four of the most pressing issues to Tulsa, the Changemakers created and led a peer-to-peer afterschool tutoring and mentoring program at Tulsa Legacy Charter School and a Diversity Field Day at Greenwood Playground. Watching the Changemakers design, recruit for, and deliver both programs was inspiring.
What is your favorite band at the moment?
Dispatch
Any special accomplishments/awards?
I was awarded the Bishop Robert Smith Award, the highest honor an undergraduate can achieve at College of Charleston, for my demonstrated leadership and academic excellence. I’m also a member of Interfaith Youth Core’s Alumni Speakers Bureau.
Apart from your work at Leadership Tulsa, what are some side projects or hobbies you have outside of the office?
I am piloting the Act Now Fellowship, an initiative that supports Camp Anytown alumni and other socially minded high school students to take interfaith action in their school communities. I am also a staff member at the Hillel of Northeastern Oklahoma. In my free time, I love to hike, bike, read, and co-run an interfaith dialogue event for adults called Radical Amazement.