{"id":412153,"date":"2026-07-25T18:01:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T18:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/412153\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T18:01:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T18:01:11","slug":"opinion-lead-san-diego-taught-me-what-really-makes-a-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/412153\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: LEAD San Diego taught me what really makes a city"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Downtown<\/a>Downtown San Diego and Mission Bay seen from Mt. Soledad on April 10, 2026. (File photo by Thomas Murphy\/Times of San Diego)<\/p>\n

I lived in San Diego from 2017 to 2021. Then a job at Johns Hopkins University took me to Baltimore, and later a role at NIH took me to Washington, and a few years after that, I got to come back. I thought it would feel like coming home right away. Instead it felt like moving to a city I used to know. My old routines were gone, my network had scattered, and I had to learn how to belong here all over again.<\/p>\n

\"Opinion<\/a><\/p>\n

LEAD San Diego<\/a> is what made that click. By the end of the program, I\u2019d put it this way: it was my homecoming. It helped me move from living in San Diego to truly belonging here, and it shaped me as a leader by reminding me that you cannot fully serve a place until you\u2019re rooted enough to know it.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t expect a leadership program to be the thing that did that. I expected content: sessions on civic systems, maybe a few useful contacts. What I got instead was so much better. A cohort of people I barely knew who, week after week on a shared project, became people I genuinely looked forward to seeing. And then a project that pulled the relationship somewhere a networking event never could have taken it.<\/p>\n

My Leadership Action Team, the service learning component of the program, was matched with MANA de San Diego<\/a>, a nearly 40-year-old organization that supports Latinas through mentorship, leadership development and scholarships, with roughly 3,000 members and supporters across the region. Our team was a wonderfully unlikely mix: a bakery owner, a bank vice president, a hospital philanthropy officer, a hotel sales director, a few others and me. <\/p>\n

None of us worked in the same industry, and while we\u2019d all been in the same cohort, I didn\u2019t really get to know any of them until we started working together on this project. It was, honestly, one of the more fun rooms I\u2019ve been in.<\/p>\n

We split into three tracks: one on revenue systems and the technology behind how MANA collects and manages money, one on rebuilding the membership model itself, and one on marketing and community partnerships. What struck me was how much sharper the diagnosis got the moment people who don\u2019t work in the nonprofit sector were in the room. A banker looks at a payment system differently than a program officer does. <\/p>\n

None of us were experts in MANA\u2019s mission, and that turned out to be exactly the point. We asked the basic questions a longtime insider stops thinking to ask, and MANA\u2019s staff, generous with their time throughout, had answers that reframed the problem more than once.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s my favorite thing about LEAD San Diego. It isn\u2019t just a leadership curriculum. It\u2019s a structured, joyful way of putting down roots in a city, by handing you a real problem and real people who are counting on you to help solve it. You can\u2019t stay a stranger to a place once you\u2019ve sat across the table from its nonprofits, genuinely trying to help them thrive.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a Teach For America<\/a> alum. I taught in Los Angeles years ago, long before any of this, and I now chair the San Diego committee for TFA\u2019s Southern California advisory board as the organization expands into the city. LEAD San Diego gave me a wonderful, concrete way to get involved again in the city I\u2019d just moved back to, at a moment when I genuinely needed it.<\/p>\n

This spring, I got to sit on the other side of the table, interviewing candidates for next year\u2019s LEAD cohort. It\u2019s a strange, good feeling, being trusted to help find the next round of people who need exactly what I needed last year.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve moved back to a place, or moved to a new one, and you\u2019re still waiting to feel like you belong there, my honest advice is this: don\u2019t wait for it to happen on its own, go find it. Somewhere, a program like Impact<\/a>, offered by LEAD San Diego, is trying to match people like you with organizations that need exactly what you have to offer. The belonging comes from doing the work together.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve come to think that\u2019s what actually makes a city a city, the relationships you build inside it. Without those, it\u2019s just buildings and concrete.<\/p>\n

Charles Lu is a nonprofit board leader based in San Diego. He is a graduate of LEAD San Diego and chairs the San Diego committee for Teach For America Southern California<\/a>\u2018s advisory board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Downtown San Diego and Mission Bay seen from Mt. Soledad on April 10, 2026. (File photo by Thomas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[165050,2500,5466,30743,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-412153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-lead-san-diego","tag-leadership","tag-nonprofits","tag-relationships","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}