My understanding of leadership is one’s ability to listen or hear people’s problems and work collaboratively with them to come up with solutions. By being at Agnes Scott, I’ve learned the importance of going to a liberal arts school, and therefore, I can relate to the abilities that Cronon portrayed in the “Only Connect” essay. I can now also see myself following logical reasoning in the future when approaching a certain problem. In the environmental justice movement, we see women taking the same approach as they fight for the rights of low income communities that are living in the sacrifice zone. Leaders listen to the communities’ problems, follow people’s arguments, try to empathize with the community but when looking for a solution leaders, collect evidence both scientific and non-scientific to support their claims. Analytical skills are very important to have as a leader as you interact with many people who will challenge you and who will want evidence in order to see if what you are saying is credible or not. Not only that Cronon explains that liberal educated people love self criticism, practice tolerance, self criticism, can write very clearly and persuasively, love to read about different things, love wisdom and they also talk to everyone and anyone. When a leader has these abilities, they are able to make a huge impact in the society by helping their community benefit from their education.
In working towards these skills, I have faced various challenges, including practicing my courage to speak in front of people by enhancing my critical thinking abilities and trying to develop logic ideas. Being at Agnes Scott has helped me practice my communication skills by connecting with a diverse group of peers in my class when learning about different challenges that women in the environmental justice community face.
I have been a person who sometimes does not like self criticism. I am very sensitive to critics but then I realized if you do not get criticized then you will never know what you are doing good in your work. I saw how many women were fighting against big companies who pollute their environment in their communities but their resilience made them learn from the critics that they received from the media, the government and the people that challenge them. After facing these challenges, they started using different approaches to solve their problems first by not being hostile, finding evidence to support their arguments by conducting research and partnering with organizations and different law firms that will fund them and help them fight for a clean environment for low income communities. This is very important to me because growing up in my community I have noticed many health problems that women and children are going through because of the lack of better health services. This has been an ongoing problem and in my opinion, I think it is because most of the leaders in the village are not making use of evidence to persuade the government and different organizations to build hospitals with experienced health personnels and resources to serve people in the rural areas. My plan is to conduct research on all rural areas in Tanzania and collect data on the number of women and children who have different health cases and were not cured in time because of the lack of resources in their areas or long distances they would have to travel to reach the hospitals. I will also collect data on the number of experienced doctors in various fields especially pediatricians and gynecologists in rural areas.
