The Ripple Effect: Building Leaders in the Wild

In 2022 and 2023, the CCO partnered with Williamson College of the Trades to do something that had never been done before.

The event itself, an eight-day canoe trip called the Junior Leadership Expedition—or JLE— was not new. This trip had been happening for 13 years. The difference was this—in the past, up to two dozen student leaders had been invited to participate. They were recommended. They were asked. And they could say no.

But in 2022, after a generous donor recognized the impact of earlier trips, the CCO's Department of Transformative Opportunities took the entire junior class into the woods—every single junior student. The trip was no longer optional.

When Williamson alum Jake Lapp found out about the change, he was immediately skeptical. “Wow. I can’t imagine the pushback you’re going to get,” he told Tom Moffit, the Vice President for Student Affairs.

It wasn’t that Jake didn’t value the trip. As a junior, he had been selected as a participant and returned as a senior student instructor. “JLE absolutely changed my life,” he said. Now he was being asked to lead again as a volunteer alumnus. But as he imagined a larger trip, he pictured classmates who had never stayed in a tent in their lives, much less paddled down a river.

A mandatory week in the woods without cell phones or showers was going to be a very unpopular idea.

Jake was right. During the first year, some students circulated a petition, calling for the trip to remain optional. “It was like torches and pitchforks,” Tom remembers, smiling. “But we knew it was one of those things that if we could just get them out there, we could change their minds.”

And Tom was also right.

Chase Whartnaby was a torches-and-pitchforks kind of participant. A junior on the most recent trip, he spent the first few days in camp making life miserable for everyone else. “Yeah, I thought it was a complete waste of time,” he says. “I was pretty brutal to the CCO instructors at the beginning.”

But Chase didn’t realize the impact his attitude was having on the rest of the group—and what that meant about him as a leader. This changed at the end of the fourth day. Before the group could leave base camp, they needed to practice river rescues, which meant floating down the river in their dry suits. Nobody wanted to do it.

“Everyone was like, ‘I’m done for the day. I just want to lay in my tent,’” Chase says. “But then our instructors asked me to get changed into my dry suit. They pulled me aside and explained that the group would follow me, because I speak up in front of everyone, if I had a bad attitude, the whole group would. But if I had a good attitude and I went and did it, the group would follow me.”

Chase put on his dry suit and jumped in, and, to his surprise, the group followed. It was a big deal. Before that moment he hadn’t seen himself as a leader. “I never really thought that people reacted to me that way,” he says. “But the instructors saw. That taught me a lot—the group followed me as a leader.”

Listening to Chase’s recollection, CCO staff and trip leader Peter Bowersox added, “It’s easy to sit there and be the guy with the bad attitude holding the group back. But it’s different when you’re the leader trying to get the group to go somewhere.”

“Absolutely,” Chase said. “When I realized that, everything changed.”

What Chase experienced, and what many Williamson students learn through JLE, is what it looks like to be a leader who is authoritative without being authoritarian, the kind of leader who takes self-sacrificial risks and helps others to flourish.

They are learning to be leaders like Jesus.

The transformation that students experience, while miraculous, isn’t accidental. All the details of the trip—the makeup of the groups, the rhythms of the schedule, the progression of concepts, and the Christ-like example of the instructors—are intentionally designed to show the students the potential impact of their leadership on others.

And their leadership matters. When participants return to campus in the fall, they are seniors, and as a part of Williamson’s leadership development program, they will be responsible for mentoring the freshmen in their specific shops—electrical, power plant, carpentry, masonry, machine, and landscape design.

Senior Justin Ford says that he wants to lead differently from the way seniors treated him as a freshman. Instead of barking orders or leaving the freshmen to figure things out on their own, he’s trying to support them along the way.

“I take their education as seriously as I take mine at the senior level, because this first semester is a pivotal moment in their experience here,” Justin says. “And I've been really hyping up their attitudes. Where they're at right now is the best place they could be, so I try to keep them in that mindset.”

Justin’s changed approach is not unique. As students return with positive stories to tell, and seniors treat freshmen with increased care and respect, momentum builds.

Even Williamson graduates, working as site managers or foremen, report that they lead differently because of what they learned on the trip. Some volunteer to return as instructors, often taking unpaid vacations to invest in the next generation of JLE participants.

At the CCO, this is the kind of ripple effect we seek—the multiplication of Kingdom vision from college campuses into all of God’s world. And through the transformation of individual students and alumni, to the campus-wide impact of JLE, this is what we are seeing at Williamson College of the Trades and beyond.

from the CCO's On Campus magazine, Fall 2023