Be the Change You Want to See

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”- Martin Luther King Jr.

Change. Billboards, internal thoughts, presidential slogans. Everywhere we turn we are bombarded by the need or want to change. But how many of us really take the initiative to “be the change we want to see in the world?”

One person who is the change she wants to see in the world is Luma Mufleh, a woman with a diverse past who created a soccer team for refugee children and changed her entire community. Luma’s story is documented in the book Outcasts United by Warren St John.

The social change that Luma has created can be based off of the Social Change Model of Leadership Development (SCM). The SCM is a framework for change through understanding one’s own personal values and working with others. Social change is the collaboration of three areas: community, group, and individual. The model identifies values that are the base of these areas. For example, group values are collaboration, common purpose, and controversy with civility.

The change Luma has been so successful in implementing can be observed under this model. She has specifically excelled in collaboration (group), citizenship (community), and congruency (individual).

Collaboration is capitalizing on different strengths and ideas of diverse groups. Luma capitalizes on the strengths of individuals when she creates her teams. Her formula for creating successful teams is selecting one-third of her players from stable environments in order to be good role models for the other players. Another third of her teams are made of players who only have occasional setbacks and the last third consists of individuals who are not very stable and who need more psychological help than the others. With this formula, Luma creates successful teams where players are successful in working together and interacting with one another as well as growing personally.

Luma’s collaborative leadership style is similar to the collaborative styles seen in the leaders featured at the end of the StrengthsFinder book () as they created teams with diverse members with different strengths. This collaborative approach helped these individuals maximize their successes in their companies and communities as well as helped Luma create a cohesive community.

Citizenship is defined as working towards change by benefiting others through care, service, social responsibility, and community involvement. Luma works hard to create a sense of community. This can be seen by the 120 individuals that includes the player’s families. At the beginning of the book, a sense of community was a huge problem. Statistics showed that as diversity increased, a sense of community decreased. Also, players at first tended to create cliques with players from the same country or area or who spoke the same languages. Luma made these players collaborate and mixed up the players for each drill by race and ethnicity in order to create a larger sense of community.

Congruency is consistently acting according to your values, or “walking the walk.” Luma’s very congruent with her coaching style. At the beginning when she was creating her first team she realized she had to set a good example for her team. She tried not to ostracize anyone by speaking Arabic so she always spoke English.

Personally, I have always had some of these ideas and this model establishes a framework for me to organize my thoughts and ideas. I always wanted a major that was meaningful and I have been trying to implement change. This has given me some ideas to better incorporate groups into some of the volunteering I am doing. I would like to encourage collaboration.

In this way, Luma has inspired me to be the change I want to see in the world. I hope to inspire others to do the same.