Healthy Leadership: Young Oregonians Need and Deserve Elders

Our job is to show them, to reflect back to them, their own brilliant selves and then get out of their way.

In this health crisis, in this generational moment to assess how Oregon and the nation can realize a more inclusive, prosperous future, a need emerges: healed, clarion leadership. Although we may assume all leadership comes from a healthy place, too often, we can take up leadership roles from a place of injury or need. We may seek power for prestige or to prove we are important enough. These are all unhealed reflexes or instincts.

It is also possible to do the right thing from an unhealed place. It is possible to want to make us a healthier, more just place and still do it from your unhealed self. That was the case when I set out to make Oregon a more equitable place by making prenatal care a human right for all women. It was also the case when we set out to pass Cover All Kids—something no one had ever tried to do before. And, so I set out to do what had never been done before, what no one had ever taught me how to do. And I did it inarticulately, clumsily.

I was a blunt instrument. I made many mistakes in the process of trying to convince an entire state to do the right thing by all our children, by all our mothers to-be. Fighting this just, difficult battle wears on you. You become a shrill thing in the wilderness screaming at injustice. And there were moments when I led unkindly, inelegantly, non collegially. Moments when I led sharply, paternalistically. This is what can happen when you become frayed by the impossible task at hand and your unhealed self emerges and tries to drag itself and others to the finish line at any cost. 

I made many mistakes in the push for justice. And now, as I do the even harder work of healing, I see how my many mistakes were actually my best teachers.

I have also learned that we have to take care that in our push for light and justice, we ourselves, do not become a sliver of darkness to someone else. We have to take care that we do not become the very injustice we are fighting to overcome.

What our young emerging leaders need is not only to be shown a new path but also to see their elders step up to own their unhealed actions, and do the work of healing themselves before we can pretend to lead them. In fact, our job is not to lead them. That is unhealed ego speaking. Our job is to show them, to reflect back to them, their own brilliant selves and then get out of their way. They don’t need our inflated egos, our inflated sense of importance. They need to see our flawed but healing selves in congruent talk and action. We need to lead toward a nonviolent world, nonviolently! 

We need to do the work of healing ourselves and become the elders they have always deserved and longed for…

Alberto Moreno successfully led campaigns to make prenatal care a human right as well as health care for all children. Alberto served as the columnist for El Hispanic News and as the Governor appointed board member on the Oregon Humanities Council.